Delivery
by Bainaku
Summary: Years after the war and four days before the summer solstice, an unexpected delivery from a messenger hawk puts into motion a field trip guaranteed to change Sokka's life forever.  Short story told in short snippets. Tokka!  COMPLETE.
1. Signed, Sealed, Delivered

**Commentary: **Here's a short story told in equally short snippets. Why so short? It's easy to read—it's easy to write! =) And it's already DONE, bwahahah! I'll post a chapter every couple of days or so.

This is for Crossy, because… because.

This is set post-series. I hope you enjoy it!

**Disclaimer: **Don't own the franchise.

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER ONE: Signed, Sealed, Delivered…**

_**or**_

**Sokka Gets a Letter**

* * *

The skitter of talons on the sill brought Sokka's head aright. Submerged up to his elbows in paperwork, practically swimming in obligation, he was eager for a moment's distraction—marginally hopeful, too, that this hawk came bearing something besides another treaty negotiation or alliance proposal.

The bird hopped impatiently along the thin bar beneath the window's smudgy panes, nipping at Sokka's fingers as he fumbled to untie its burden. "Hold still," he hissed. Unwilling to submit to such a request, the hawk scored his knuckle with its message-blunted beak, shook itself free of him, and took wing again. The small scroll formerly attached to the bird rolled across Sokka's desk with a clatter, its seal cracked.

Cursing and sucking at the small wound, Sokka unrolled the scroll with his thumb—noting idly that the crumbling seal was green—and scanned its top for an official crest. There was none. The majority of the scroll, in fact, yielded nothing but an expanse of blank parchment, and only near the missive's curling bottom did the tribesman locate the intended message.

_Come to Gaoling by the solstice at the latest_, the hurried line of scrawl read. _Make it snappy. I need you._

And then, beneath that: _Just you._

No opening—no signature, no address. No pleasantries.

No one in Gaoling but his best friend in the world, Toph Bei Fong.

Sokka reread the message three times. He said aloud to the stack of border contracts at his elbow, "She must be in pretty deep if she asked someone to write a letter for her." Under his desk his boots tapped out a staccatoed concert, and beneath his parka he felt the prickle of nervous sweat start up in earnest. _Prison?_ he wondered, and dismissed the thought immediately. No—it wasn't likely a rural Earth Kingdom jail could hold Toph; she wouldn't need his help with that. _Death in the family? _That was only slightly more plausible, because Lao and Poppy Bei Fong had never been ill to Sokka's knowledge, not to mention both were fairly young. _Maybe another Rumble tournament? _Could be, could be.

Still, though, sending a message, especially with an arrival deadline…

"That's very un-Tophlike," Sokka informed his cup of tea, left over from lunch and long since cold. Absently he rolled the scroll up again, fixing it closed with a dab of sealing wax and a thumb's firm press. His eyes trailed to his calendar, half-buried beneath a faltering cascade of trade regulation memorandums. He counted the little squares on that calendar's barely visible grid.

Four days 'til the summer solstice.

"Looks like it's time for a field trip," he observed sagely. Papers rustled as he stood, tucking the scroll into the confines of his vest. Hooking his fingers about his lunchtime beverage cup, he threw the cool dregs of the tea through the open window, replaced the mug on his desk, and strode resolutely from his office.

A harassed voice in the alleyway beneath the window wailed, "My cabbages!"


	2. RSVP'd

**Commentary: **Here's the next wee bit. =) Thanks for reviewing! Please continue to do so if you enjoy it!

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER TWO: RSVP'd  
**

_**or**_

**Sokka Cashes in a Favor**

* * *

Fifteen minutes of frenzied packing later, Sokka made haste across Ba Sing Se's western corridor to the center of the city proper. There a flash of his badge permitted him entry to the Earth Kingdom's most hallowed halls. Halfway up the steps of the palace he started yelling out the name of the person he'd come to see, letting the summons echo across the stately court: "AANG! AANG! _AAAAAAAANG_!"

By the time Sokka reached the staircase's summit, a gangly orange-clad youth possessed of a shining pate was gliding toward him above the courtyard. They slipped between the atrium's columns together, Sokka's bootheels clacking faintly, Aang's slight soles noiseless in their whisper over the tilework. Aang grinned at his friend sidelong, dipping his hands into his sleeves, and Sokka volleyed a smirk back.

Once out of sight and earshot of the palace's meandering court, the Avatar voiced, "Any particular reason you howled for me in the middle of my meeting with the king, or were you just feeling lonely?" Despite the jibe, true concern shone in his soft stormcloud eyes. Steps slowing, he forked his elbow into Sokka's ribs. The tribesman felt the scroll in his vest compress and settled his fingers over it protectively.

"I need a favor," Sokka admitted. Aang's smooth brow rose and the warrior confirmed, "I need to borrow Appa for a few days. I got a letter from—"

_Toph_, he almost said, and then he remembered those two words in her message: _just you_. He paused, a frown twisting his mouth down at the corner. Was he supposed to say anything? Was her message a secret, her request a confidence? Suddenly the scroll against his skin felt heavy and hot, and he scrubbed at it gingerly, conflicted.

"From?" prompted Aang. Searching Sokka's face, he blinked and observed, sly, "It's an admirer, isn't it?"

"What? No—_nooooo_, no no no, _nuuuu_. It's a friend! It's, uh, someone you know, but she, ahaha, she asked to see _just _me and I have to be there in four days, and—"

"Admirer," Aang chirped to Momo, who dropped abruptly from the sky to light on the youth's thin shoulder. "Sokka's got an _admirer_, Momo! Let's help him out." Pulling up the summoning whistle he wore around his neck on a thin brown thong, the Avatar gave it a single long burst and told Sokka smugly, "Appa'll be here in a few minutes. Did you need his saddle too? It's back at the inn—"

"No, but Aang, listen, it's not what you think—"

"Probably not," Aang agreed with perfect amiability, "but then again I have a _very_ vivid imagination, Sokka, so that's not surprising." He clapped Sokka firmly on the elbow. "Can you be back by the end of week after next? Katara and I are supposed to be in Omashu to negotiate the final treaty with Bumi's court and Zuko's ambassadors, and it would be great if we could all fly there together. They haven't had the courage to say as much, but I know they want you there too." He paused, then ventured, "Unless you need a longer vacation?"

Sokka sighed, fetching a guilty glance over his shoulder toward his now-deserted office. He had one in nearly every major city across the four nations, each just as stacked with papers and responsibility as the next—and why not, when his peacemaking prowess was so desired? Personally he thought Katara was better at being nice and kissing political buttock, but Sokka was still okay enough at his job to be helping people, _tons _of people…

Still, the idea of taking a month off to simply hang out with his best friend—going to taverns with her, sparring with her, staying up to all hours _talking _to her… Sokka was a diplomat, a bureaucrat, a war hero, and he was also a few weeks shy of his twentieth birthday. A long vacation in the best, most raucous company _ever_ was awfully tempting.

Duty pricked that temptation and Sokka allowed, resigned, "No sweat. A little break's good enough." He gave Aang a smile—a real one, from the toes up. "Thanks for this, dude."

Flapping his slender fingers, Aang grinned. "Hey, we all need a timeout now and then. Say hi to your lady for me." As Appa's shadow drifted over the courtyard and began to expand with the bison's descent, the youth cocked his head. He pursued carefully, "Sokka, uhm… it's not Suki, is it?" He scratched at the back of his gleaming head. "I thought you two were, you know…" Sleeves billowing, Aang dropped his hands and steepled them. A gap grew between them as he pulled them pointedly apart again, crafting a canyon between pale knuckles that made Sokka's stomach twist a little for its truth.

As much as he was a treaty-maker, there were some wounds Sokka was simply too hapless to mend.

"We are," he said, and revisited, "I'm not going to see an admirer, Aang. _Really_."

The ground shook under Appa's nearby touchdown, and the bison's master eyed Sokka in that weird, see-through way that was apparently exclusive to the savior of all humankind. "Well," Aang mused, "we'll _see_ about that."

And he winked.

Sokka threw up his hands. He climbed aboard Appa's flank. Hauling himself to the captain spot behind the bison's ears, he stuck his tongue out at the Avatar, cried fiercely, "Yip yip!" and soared skyward. His vest puffed up slightly—the end of the scroll within slid free and caught the fresh breeze, scuttering in the summer currents. Reaching up to run his fingers over it, Sokka murmured, "On my way, Toph."


	3. Stamp of Approval

**Commentary: **I'm about to go dig through a greenhouse for several hours and I was worried I wouldn't get back in time to post this later, so here's the third snibblet—and it's early! I hope you enjoy it. =) Thank you so much for your reviews. I will respond to them when I get home today, no matter how covered in earth I am. ;)

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER THREE: Stamp of Approval**

_**or**_

**Toph Drops a Bomb**

* * *

For once in his life, Sokka's luck held during the journey between Ba Sing Se and Gaoling. He skirted a squall line and rode the desert thermals in a dive down south across the kingdom's great continent. On the fourth day of traveling, he squinted into the horizon's hazy smudge and caught his first glimpse of the mountains that flanked Toph's hometown. He urged Appa on a few hours past nightfall, anxious to arrive the next day per Toph's deadline. Content to fly on in the warm sky beneath winking, bright-eyed stars, Appa obliged.

After a short break for ill-snatched sleep, the tribesman took to the clouds again. He watched dawn crest over the mountains, a smoldering eruption of pinks and oranges—he felt the heat of midmorning rising from the foothills of those mountains, and as the hours ticked away his stomach tied itself in knots. "Late," he groaned to Appa, gently squeezing the bison's ear. "I'm _late_ and I don't even know what for, but Toph'll kill me, Appa, she really will—"

Further speculation regarding his own lifespan died on Sokka's lips as a faint curl of smoke rose into view. Whooping, he guided Appa down through the low clouds and leaned away from the bison's head to gauge the terrain. Speckled with small white houses and crisscrossed by roads, he recognized it immediately: Gaoling!

Nudging Appa with his knees, he guided the great beast lower still, scanning the village frantically for the sprawl of the Bei Fong estate. He found it easily—no one else in town had a house as big by half—and was startled to see it swarming with guests, the gardens laced in myriad obnoxiously-colored streamers, the creen of dance music audible even over a sky's distance. All signs pointed to one thing: the Bei Fongs were throwing one hell of a party.

…had Toph really written to him because she wanted him to go to a _party_?

"Exotic booze, here I come," exulted a willing albeit puzzled Sokka.

He landed Appa in a patch of forest nearby the estate—close enough to walk, far enough give the beast peace from the villagers while he went to visit Toph. Rubbing the bison's expansive nose, Sokka thanked him, "Couldn't have gotten here without you, buddy," and left him munching the grass at the fringe of a copse. A clocktower somewhere in the village chimed one past midday as the tribesman jogged from the trees, making haste toward the walls of his best friend's home.

He was halfway there when the ground off to his left surged up like a wave and opened, admitting from its crumbling clutches a young woman in a buttercup-yellow dress. Cursing, she tripped—fabric ripped, _shrup!_ Not a second later she hiked up the fluttering garment and marched toward Sokka, a snarl of roots in her hair, a smear of something like clay on her cheeks. She drew closer and Sokka, incredulous, squinted—it was _rouge _on her face, not earth! How many maids had died putting that there?

And then her arms were around him and her foot came down hard against the top of his boot, admonishing. Through his vest he felt her quivering, and he wasn't sure if it was in rage or relief or some other weird uncharted Toph-emotion. "Geez, took you long enough!" she growled into his chest. "You're _late_, Snoozles."

"Fashionably so," retorted the tribesman, slinging his own arms around the smaller warrior. She relaxed into him, all hard strength and small sturdiness. For an instant he marveled at how easily she fit there in the hollow of his elbows. It was both endearing and enough to give him heart palpitations—hugging Toph felt like hugging a live torpedo.

He said next, "Speaking of fashion, you're all prettied up. Must be a killer party, huh?"

"My parents know how to shake things up when they really want to, yeah." She turned her face into his collar, smearing the rouge over the fabric there. He didn't mind. Licking her lips, she continued, "Listen, Snoozles, this reunion's all tender and sweet and stuff, but there's not a lot of time. Let me just cut to the chase, okay?"

Sokka sobered instantly, tightening the ring of his grasp the tiniest bit. "Right."

"I'm really glad you came because, see, there's something I need your help with and as much as it seriously gives me an ulcer to admit I can't do this alone"—Toph's voice lowered to a grumble—"it's not a one-woman job. In fact, I sorta… need a guy. For this. A special guy." She gave him a particularly hard prod in the nipple. "That's you."

"Special?" Sokka asked, inwardly a mix of dubious and delighted. _Toph thinks I'm special?_

"Uh-huh. You're the only man who'll do for this, actually." Toph lifted her head and stared somewhere off to the left of his chin. Her grin ate up the lower half of her face, the sinister sneer of one with a grand scheme nearly finished cooking.

"…pretty serious stuff, sounds like," Sokka observed warily. _That grin's gotten me thrown in jail five times._

"You could say that," hedged the Earthbender. Behind the wall of the estate a wind ensemble started up in earnest; she winced, ducking her head. "The flutist's out of tune," she groused. She took a breath, the remnant rouge on her cheekbones glowing in uneven clumps, and related, "I'm running a really big scam here. Like, the _queen _of all scams. The absolute monarch. The lord of all lordly—"

"I get it, I get it! What scam is it, Toph?"

Leaning back in the circle of his arms, the Earthbender announced, "I'm supposed to get married today."


	4. BCC'd

**Commentary: **Fourth snippet! Hope you enjoy it. =) Thank you so much for taking the time to leave your comments—I really appreciate it! I'm also posting this from a smartphone, so if you see any errors in this chapter, chances are I've wholly missed them. Please let me know about them if you happen to spot them.

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER FOUR: BCC'd**

_**or**_

**Toph is the Worst Wedding Planner **_**Ever**_

* * *

Sokka considered this. The flutist _was _out of tune, he noticed, and Toph's dress had five little smudges on the hem where she'd stepped on it coming to meet him. "Married," he said.

"Yeah." Toph's grin faded to a serious half-scowl. She lifted a finger to pick her nose, thought the better of it, and lowered the digit.

"To who?"

She used the almost-nosepicker finger to prod his chest a second time. "To you."

"Oh." Sokka considered again. "You mean people are supposed to _think _you're getting married to me today, right? Because—"

"What I need you to do," interrupted his friend, "is go through the ceremony with me, and then at the end of it find some reason why you can't say yes to me being your wife. I don't care _what _that reason is, but you're good at improvising! You're the man with the _plan_, right?"

"I—"

"_Damn right _you are!" She clutched at his wrists, a hint of desperation in the movement. "Please," she said. "_Please_. My parents, my… my _stupid _parents, they…"

She tried to smile. Sokka, horrified, watched it bloom and wilt again like a cactus flower in the desert, and then Toph continued, tone a bitter snarl, "They're lucky I love them, you know that? They're just—I mean, they are _so_ lucky, because if anyone else was harassing me like this I'd just smash them into paste and be done with it." The ribbons on the front of her dress shivered as Toph inhaled, held the breath, and let it out again in a hiss. "They want me to get married so badly that they've started paying suitors to court me! There are _hordes _of men following me around—waiting to chat me up everywhere I go too! _Everywhere_!" She punctuated each syllable of the word with an infuriated foot-stomp. "Do you have _any _idea," she raged, "how hard it is to maintain a reputation as a warrior—as _anything _serious—when you're being trailed by a pack of swooning male idiots?"

"Can't say I've ever had that particular problem," Sokka put in, but Toph ignored him and went on.

"You can't just kill 'em either. Apparently they're important people." She mushed her lips together. Those were painted too, Sokka realized. "And locking them in rock up to their nuts is enough to get jail time because they're all stupid sissy _princesses_—"

"That really _would _hurt, you know."

Top gave him a flat, merciless glare. "They serenade me at night. _Badly_. They send me bouquets of peonies—I'm _allergic _to peonies, Sokka, but did you know that explosive snot fits are considered an expression of praise in the Makapu region?"

"That's definitely news to me," commiserated the tribesman.

"They even," spat the diminutive Earthbender, "write me poetry. _Poetry._" Reaching up to take hold of her eyelids, Toph peeled them away from her pewter gaze and all but roared,_ "_I'm blind, damnit! _BLIND!_" She maneuvered the flaps of skin up and down like window shades.

Sokka surveyed Toph as she continued to seethe, his hands on his hips, his mind worlds away from the boiling spew pouring from his best friend's lips. Three words echoed again and again in his head: _me. Toph. Marriage. Me. Toph. Marriage. Me. Toph. Marriage—_

"Me," he said aloud. Toph fell quiet mid-bitchfest, mouth ajar. "You," he tried. And finally: "Marriage."

Some merciful deity—or just an irate conductor—snuffed out the horrendous wind ensemble, leaving only the breeze's low whisper and the rustle of trees around them. Toph, eyes narrowed, shook her head and provided after the briefest pause, "_Nooo_. You, me, _not-marriage_. Weren't you listening? The plan is that you're supposed to say _no _to the whole marrying me thing."

Sokka attempted, "I just don't—"

_Fweet_ squealed the flutist a final time. Teeth bared, Toph stomped a foot, listened with relish to the distant resulting, "GWACK!" of pain, and hissed, "You just don't _what_?"

Her small chest heaved. Standing before him with her legs squared and her hands crooked into small ferocious-looking death-claws, Toph dared—silently—Sokka to offer up a challenge.

Years of suffering through diplomatic meetings between the Avatar and his sister, however, proved now to be a boon to Sokka, and the tribesman peaceably waved his hands and murmured, "Easy there, Thunderpants. I just don't understand how me leaving you at the altar is going to solve your problem. You know—men following you everywhere and stuff." Despite that the gesture was lost on Toph, Sokka wagged his fingers in the direction of the Bei Fong estate. "Won't your parents just start sending them after you again?"

"Thunderpants, heh"—a dim grin cracked Toph's granite snarl—"that's not bad." Shaking her head, she pivoted on her heel slightly away from Sokka, bent such that the yellow dress rucked up to mid-calf. The early afternoon sunlight shone down her pale legs—the tops of her feet were a thorn-story of crisscrossing scars, the edges of her toes still specked by the shining flesh of burn wounds long healed. Sokka stared at the evidence of a friendship spanning years until a muscle jumping in Toph's cheek drew his gaze aloft again.

Quiet persisted. This time no incompetent flutist thought it prudent to provide a distraction.

"If all goes according to plan, they'll stop with all this suitor nonsense because they'll have their hands and hearts full pitying me," Toph said at length. She relaxed and supplied Sokka a smile, the expression tinged with preemptive victory and a hint of what looked suspiciously like surrender. It made the tribesman's belly clench—Toph just didn't _do _surrender.

He queried, "Pitying you?"

"Yeah, Snoozles. Think of it—think of what people will _say_. 'Poor little Toph, left at the altar by the love of her life,'" sighed the Earthbender. She nibbled her lower lip. "My parents are crazy," she muttered, "and traditional, and sometimes I might want to kill them, sure, but at the end of the day they're my parents and they love me. And because of that love, they'll take one look at my heartbroken face and marrying me off will suddenly be the _last _thing on their minds." Blowing her bangs into their usual scatter, she finished, "I'll bet you ten silver pieces on it."

"I'll take that bet," Sokka replied immediately. "Your plan has a flaw. A big one. Hu-_uuuuuge_."

"Uh-huh?" Toph lifted both eyebrows. "And what's that?"

"While your acting skills are pretty sweet," admitted the warrior, thinking back with a smirk to their days swindling swindlers in the Fire Nation, "they're pretty limited too. You can pull off the helpless little blind girl bit when you want, sure—it helps that people expect it. But heartbroken?" Head cocked, Sokka persisted, "Can you really _convincingly _pretend to be heartbroken? I mean c'mon, Toph—"

The breeze coiled around them and Toph lifted her head. Her eyes met his. It was accidental on her part, of course, but for Sokka the effect was profound anyway: like being punched in the gut by the Boulder or something.

Not since gazing in the mirror after his breakup with Suki had Sokka seen anyone look so heartsick.

Flicking her eyes away again, Toph shrugged. "Who said anything about pretending?"


	5. Undisclosed Recipients

**Commentary: **This one's a bit longer than the others, though not by much. Sorry about that! I do hope it answers some questions. ;) I also hope you enjoy it.

* * *

**_DELIVERY_**

**CHAPTER FIVE: Undisclosed Recipients**

_**or**_

**Sokka's Not the **_**Only**_** Strategist in the World**

* * *

"Wait," Sokka insisted, staring at his best friend. His pulse was like a gong in his ears and there was a lump in his throat that wouldn't go down—he choked on it, tongue thick between his teeth. "W-wait just a sec—"

"I don't have the luxury of waiting," Toph informed him testily, "since a certain meat-munching moron I know arrived _late _to his own wedding." A series of chimes rang out from the direction of the Bei Fong estate as though in agreement. Squaring her jaw into a grim smile, Sokka's best friend allowed, "Speaking of weddings, hey, that's our cue. Let's get this party started."

Sokka dimly registered a pulling sensation nearby his wrist. Looking down, he discovered Toph's fingers there—and below that, wow, the ground was moving and his feet were too, right-left-right-left—

Digging his heels firmly into the grass, the tribesman came back to himself and yelped, "You _like _me?"

"Give the man a _prize_!" With a grunt, Toph dragged him forward another few steps. "Come on. Pick up your feet or we'll be late and _really_, you don't want to provoke my mom into a rant about punctuality—"

"You"—Sokka worked at simultaneously wresting Toph's fingers away and clutching at them too—"_like _me?"

"Since I was twelve years old!" agreed the Earthbender. "Yes! Eureka! _Move your ass_!"

"You"—this came out in a blurt—"want to _marry me_?"

Toph stopped. Her fingers slid a little in the sweat on his wrist and the sinews in her arm flexed, tight and knotted around her elbow like the balls of twine-fabric Gran Gran used to lace up boots. Nails grating over the pulsepoint under his thumb, Toph said, "No. I don't wanna marry _anyone_."

Sokka swallowed and wondered why he felt a little disappointed, but then his best friend started talking again.

"I'm sixteen." Because saying it once didn't convey the weight Toph wanted, she repeated, "I'm _sixteen_. I've never dated. All those little kisses you used to give Suki—those things you'd tell her when you thought no one else could hear, and the way you touched her"—Sokka felt his cheeks flame—"I've never had anyone do that to me, for me. No one's ever liked me enough."

That statement inspired a spear of guilt in Sokka. Toph heard it somehow, probably—her jaw clenched and she lowered her hand to curl her fingers over his, squeezing them. "Hey," she said, "it's okay. It's not like you aren't awesome, Snoozles. There just wasn't really anyone except you and I don't even know if we'd work—I mean, you and Suki didn't, right? And you two were… you were pretty good friends."

She admitted this grudgingly, Sokka noticed, and it made him smile. "Better friends than anything else," he agreed. "We both kept trying to force it into something else—we liked each other so much, but it just didn't…"

The words faded and Sokka remembered the silences that had grown between himself and the Kyoshi Warrior after the war's end, the lapse of laughter—the letters that had come first in torrents, next in trickles, and finally not at all.

Those memories stung. He _missed _Suki even after years gone by because Toph was right, they _had _been friends, and he finished lamely, "Yeah. It just didn't work." Not a breath later, he tacked on, "And it sucked."

Toph nodded. She didn't apologize, though, or offer her condolences. She wasn't the sort for empty comforts. Instead she said, "You got the chance to try, anyway. If there's anything I want right now, it's that. I want the chance to _try _with someone before I marry them." She took up walking again and Sokka followed, letting her lead him toward the gate of her family's estate. "That's what this is," she continued. "I figured, you know, if I could just be convincing enough to get them off my back for a while… this might be that chance." She opened her mouth to carry on, frowned—left off. Together they passed through the outermost wall of her parents' home—Toph pulled open the stone like putty—and stepped into the exterior courtyard.

The shadows of streamers flapping overhead flickered across the lawn like snakes. Sokka asked, "If you don't want to marry me, Toph, why—no, _how_ is this gonna bother you enough for you to _be _convincing?"

A knife of sound: servants, a clustered several, came rushing forward to… well, Sokka wasn't sure _what _they intended to do, but one of them had a hairbrush brandished high like some sort of religious talisman. When they were within touching distance, Toph calmly flexed her toes and dug a shallow pit beneath them. As they plummeted into the crater with a collective squawk and a puff of dust, the Earthbender murmured, "You've never outright told me no before." Before Sokka could ask what that meant, she clarified, "You didn't have to because you didn't know. I mean, it was dumb, wasn't it? First I had a stupid crush on you and then it was something else, it was _more than that_, but you were with Suki and I couldn't say anything then, and I was twelve and it's not like you were married, you were just dating and we, the two us, you know... we had something you and Suki didn't, and that was okay." Groping for words, she went on, "We're friends, we're—we're like _best _friends and that was enough for me because you weren't exactly _taken_-taken, and you weren't standing there in front of me either telling me _no, Toph, never you_, and as long as I didn't think about it—"

Slowing into stillness on the painfully pretty grass, Toph wrung Sokka's wrist between her fingers. She did it fiercely, firmly, testing the give and pull of the skin there, and finally she said, "I might not want to marry you, Sokka, but I _do _like you and I have for a long time. And even if this marriage thing is a scam for all these morons"—her free arm swept toward the gardens where presumably the ceremony was taking place—"hearing you essentially tell me to get lost? That's gonna hurt. Because scam or not, it'll finally be gone, won't it?"

Sokka ventured hesitantly as a Tsungi horn droned out the first notes of what might have been a ballad, "What'll finally be gone?"

Toph smiled. It was a bitter, resigned sort of smile, the kind that just didn't belong on her face ever, and she answered, "My chance." A moment passed—an uncomfortable one for both of them, yes, but probably more so for Toph, who was about as good with emotion as she was with juggling flaming torches. "My chance with _you_," she grated eventually. "It'll be gone—when you tell me no. If it was ever there at all, which it probably wasn't, but hey. You saying no to me at the altar? That'll just be"—and her hand unfurled from about his wrist to make a cutting motion in the air between them—"the end of it. Officially. …sort of."

Out of the corner of his eye Sokka observed one of the servants dragging herself from Toph's haphazard pit with the hairbrush still clenched between determined teeth. Straightening, he groped for Toph's hand again—she jerked when he took it—and drew her away from the zealous hired help. They skirted the wall of the gardens, their steps muffled by the rising efforts of the Tsungi horn behind said wall. People were chattering there too, hundreds of them maybe, their voices a buzzing lull and their milling presence cloying. Somewhere in the unseen crowd, a woman laughed.

"Toph—" Sokka began.

"_Where are they?_" interrupted a familiar voice behind the wall. It wasn't a particularly strong or even carrying thing, that voice, but it _did _command respect. A hush took the crowd. Toph stiffened a little at Sokka's elbow and her father, Lao Bei Fong, emphatically asked a second time, "Where _are _they? They are"—from behind the wall came the unmistakable click of a pocket watch; Sokka wondered just how he was able to hear _that _of all things—"nearly late."

"Your parents," Sokka realized. The thought hit him like a thunderclap and he reeled, tightening his hand over Toph's, his other palm pressed to the garden wall. "Your _parents_—Toph, they've met me, they know who I am, they know I'm a Water Tribe _dweeb_ and—" Suddenly he was fifteen again, fifteen and sitting in a lavish dining room as Toph's parents' eyes swept coldly over him and away and he was part of the scenery, nothing else, not important, as mundane and meager and lifeless as the silverware sparkling on the table. Weakly he managed, "—and what did you say to them to convince them I'm worthy of their only daughter, huh? Did you lie? Did you tell them I'm someone else, someone _important_? You had to have lied—"

Toph punched him. The fist, its knuckles canted in a soft side uppercut, hit the bottom of his jaw with enough force to make his teeth click together. He bit his tongue and the taste of copper sprang into his mouth—but that was all and because it was Toph hitting him, he counted himself lucky he wasn't missing a molar.

"You're an idiot if you think you're not a decent marriage candidate for me," said Toph, "what with oh, you know, having helped save the world and all, and you're also an asshole for thinking I'd lie about you." Tapping her finger against the spot where she'd only seconds before clocked him, she put in, "I told them how awesome you are. They didn't believe me. But see, Sokka, I _do _have a brain and I _knew _they wouldn't, so I had someone else talk to them about you too. Someone they _had _to believe."

"Who?" Sokka demanded, rubbing his jaw.

With a shrug and an unapologetic grin, Toph opened the garden wall and pulled him through it, thus stepping without fanfare or announcement into her own wedding.

Sokka looked around. Across the great green sprawl of the Bei Fong inner lawn stood what looked like Gaoling's entire population, the lot bedecked in finery. Afternoon sunlight spangled and frothed through countless wine glasses; the streamers overhead snapped like firecrackers, and at the fore of the party a man with a blue arrow on his brow beamed from his position between Toph's expectant parents. He saluted Sokka with a merry wave.

"Hi guys!" Aang chirped.

And winked.


	6. Handle With Care

**Commentary: **Part six! Oh snap!

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER SIX: Handle With Care**

_**or**_

**Sokka Takes Matters into His Own Hands**

* * *

"Aw man," Sokka opined. To his own ears his voiced sounded far away and echo-y, like another person's yell in a wide stone room. "A conspiracy? So not cool."

Somewhere off to the left, a wine glass shattered and its owner tittered nervously. There were a few kids crawling around under one of the tables nearby the altar—one little freckle-cheeked Earth Kingdom girl peeped at Sokka and Toph through a gap in the dangling napkins, and Sokka shot her a weird, stretchy smile that felt too big for his face. With a scowl, the child showed him her tongue and slipped from sight. Toph—who had probably seen more of the exchange than Sokka himself, even without operational eyes—snorted.

The band began to play.

Toph's fingers twined in his, surprisingly soft and slow now that they were here and there was no point in rushing. She tugged them and he followed the pull, shortening his stride to match her small steps. From the corner of her mouth she whispered, "Surprise, Snoozles." And then: "Sorry. Except, you know. Not really."

For the barest second and behind the red shivery curtain that flashed up behind his eyes, Sokka was angry. Angrier than he'd been in his whole life, actually, filled up with a weird kind of fury he had no idea what to do with or how to squash. This wasn't the _they-killed-my-mom _rage that had colored his perception and crafted his biases before and during part of the war, nor was it the _they-have-my-girlfriend _frenzy that had made him once pin the Fire Nation's princess against a wall with a sword inches from her vulnerable skull. This was different, this was _Toph-inflicted_, this was a my-best-friend-didn't-trust-me-enough-to-clue-me-in-inspired funk, and Sokka felt a snarl bubbling up in his chest and Spirits, he was going to let it out, he was going to _scream _because no one had asked what _he _wanted, had they, and—

Toph cleared her throat and shifted her fingers against his own. He felt the shaking then: the tremor in her hand, in her arm, in her whole body. He flicked a glance sideways and found Toph shivering all over, eyes wide in her porcelain face, flared nostrils quivering faintly. She'd stopped walking too, he realized—she was rooted to the spot, and if he took another step he was apt to start dragging her. With another strangled, half-gasping sound, she clutched at his hand and leaned closer to him, and the sweat on their palms went _squick _in the warm, smothering stillness of the afternoon.

"Hold on to me," she hissed, forcing out next, "I _can't_," and Sokka's anger melted into nothing.

Hooking their hands sturdily together, Sokka gave Toph's rigid little claw a squeeze and led her through the crowd to the altar.

It took approximately fifteen seconds, that walk, and the tribesman spent most of it doing two things. The first was looking at his best friend sidelong. Toph was pretty in her getup despite the smeared rouge and torn dress—maybe she was even beautiful, and Sokka flirted with that idea as their steps took them nearer to the front of the garden. Toph Bei Fong, beautiful? The sunlight skipped and shimmered over the ripples in her dark hair like oil on water, gleaming a thousand-thousand colors, and inside his head a small, sure voice whispered, _She always has been. _That voice gracefully tacked on, _Idiot_.

The second thing Sokka did on the journey to the altar was plot furiously. He was better at that than he was ogling his best friend's apparent good looks, and frankly he was offended that Aang and Toph had left him out of the loop on this one. _They _were Benders, okay, sure, but wasn't _he_ supposed to be the plan guy?

They reached the altar which, upon closer examination, turned out to be a fancy table covered in very important-looking scrolls. Each of those scrolls bore the Bei Fong crest in at least three places, and Sokka barely had time to recognize the words _Marriage Contract _on one of them before Toph's voice drew his eyes violently upright again.

"I present to you, my honored parents, my future husband," intoned the Earthbender. Sliding her hand free of Sokka's, she replaced it in the small of the tribesman's back and shoved him forward. As Sokka staggered into the slight but stern-faced form of Lao Bei Fong, she finished, "Though he is late and woefully underdressed, he is dear to me"—Sokka missed seeing the faintest of smiles twitch over her mouth—"and I hope he pleases you."

Sokka stepped on the man's foot, jerked backward, elbowed Toph's mother in the boob, flinched away, knocked foreheads with Aang, and finally came to an awkward standstill under the eyes of who he could only assume were hundreds of Earth Kingdom dignitaries. With all the poise he could muster, he brushed off the front of his vest—dotted with strands of long white curling Appa-fur and smudges of rouge—squared his shoulders, and offered his hand to Toph's father.

"Sokka," he provided.

Lao Bei Fong took Sokka's slender brown fingers in a grip that was surprisingly similar to the bite of a saber-toothed mooselion. His eyes were dark and sharp and shining, like tiny river stones, and in them Sokka detected nothing but scorn and flat reptilian hatred. In a strange way it comforted him, that hatred, because with its presence the tribesman knew Toph's father cared about her a little. The man was looking at Sokka as he might look at a thief he was unable to stop from stealing his greatest treasure.

Through clenched teeth Gaoling's wealthiest resident observed, "So you're the man marrying my daughter." The bones in Sokka's hand creaked. Aang, standing a little behind Lao and Poppy now, shot the warrior a grin and a thumbs up.

Sokka looked over his shoulder at Toph, who blinked blankly back in his general direction.

_Here we go, Plan Guy, _he thought.

Aloud Sokka said, "Actually, sir, there's been a misunderstanding."


	7. From Point A

**Commentary: **Yet again, a little bit longer than usual. I hope it's worth it!

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER SEVEN: From Point A…**

_**or**_

**Sokka Spins a Tale**

* * *

"Misunderstanding?" That was Toph's mother, Poppy Bei Fong.

Sokka turned his attention to the woman. The roundness of her face and the shape of her eyes she had gifted to Toph, and those things—plus the polite tolerance in her gaze—made her marginally more agreeable to look at than her husband. Tipping his head to her in deference, Sokka agreed, "Yes ma'am. A misunderstanding."

He paused for effect and used that pause to ferret around in his vest for the pair of reading glasses one of his secretaries had given him several months prior. Miraculously they were still there, having endured countless washes intact. Settling them on his nose, Sokka prayed to the Spirits they made him look more official than he felt. He tweaked the edge of the (admittedly bent) frames; the lenses caught the sun and sent a golden spray of light over both Lao's dark robe and Aang's bare feet. Clearing his throat, he supplied, "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but I haven't agreed to marry anyone. You've been duped. Someone has been lying to you."

For a moment—one single beautiful, sun-dappled, spellbound moment—no one in the garden made a sound. Even the birds, bless their little tweety hearts, refrained from singing.

But then the grass—the _grass_!—rustled as Toph stepped forward. That was the first disturbance. The second was the crackle of Sokka's neck as the Earthbender reached up, grabbed his wolftail, and yanked him down to the level of her mouth.

"_What are you doing this is not part of the plan I am going to kill you_," she hissed in his ear.

Lao snarled, "WHAT?"

"I beg your _pardon_?" his wife gasped.

"What Sokka means is—" Aang started, the panic in his voice unmistakable.

"Aang," Sokka interrupted. He revisited, "_Avatar _Aang." Twisting his head from Toph's grasp, which was easier said than done and involved leaving a very painful amount of hair behind in her convulsively twitching fingers, the tribesman drew himself up to his full height. "Toph," he continued, and finished, "esteemed parents—no, respected _elder_ Bei Fongs." He looked over the lenses at the Earthbender's fuming family. "I offer you all my deepest, most humble, and perfectly sincere apologies."

He let that hang there a few seconds—a few delicious, satisfying seconds. Already the murmurs had started in the wedding party: had the Avatar lied to the Bei Fongs? Had Toph lied to her parents? Lao, his lips curled in a snarl still, looked between the bald savior and the world's greatest Earthbender, apparently wondering the same thing his guests were. Poppy looked too stunned to contemplate more than basic functionality. For his part, Aang's mouth swung ajar and his eyes bulged and he was probably having heart palpitations, unaccustomed as he was to being—however indirectly—accused of lying by one of his best friends in front of a huge crowd. Underfoot the ground gave a faint shiver, and a glance in Toph's direction told Sokka that she too was milliseconds from losing her shit.

In his heart of hearts and for the briefest instant, Sokka savored their confusion, their chaos, their fear.

_Trying to outplan the plan guy, huh? _he thought, not without some small malice. _Amateurs. Watch the master._

Before either of his friends could say or do anything incriminating, and also before Lao Bei Fong had the opportunity to pop a vital blood vessel, Sokka cut in smoothly, "Those apologies aside, I might also be able to offer an explanation. As the last person to come into the situation, I believe"—he tweaked the glasses again; were they helping? He hoped they were helping—"I can see what happened here."

"Really? Please _enlighten_ us," growled Toph. The sound of her grinding teeth was thunderous. Her unseeing eyes flashed grey death.

Reaching out to pat her gently on the arm—_I'm going to pay for that later in bruises_, he mused—Sokka reassured his best friend, "You have _every _right to be angry, Toph. So do your parents. Avatar Aang"—the tribesman shot the other youth a look—"I know your personal beliefs shy from grudges, but perhaps even _you _could afford a little… well, _wrath_, shall we say, regarding this _terrible _circumstance."

"Uh," opined Aang, his face a mix of hopeful and horribly confused.

"_Conspiracy_!" Sokka accused, throwing an arm skyward. He pointed at the harmless clouds drifting past. The sleeve of the tunic beneath his vest flapped importantly—yeah, that was good, that was _great_. As the assembled crowd gasped and Poppy Bei Fong's fingers flew to her lips, he said again, more softly this time, "A conspiracy. That's what this is." Lowering his hand, Sokka gave the glasses a final twitch, leaned as close as he dared to the seething elder merchant, and asked, "Do you have enemies, Mr. Bei Fong?"

Whispers erupted throughout the assembled crowd. Poppy looked fearfully askance at her husband, who reached up to adjust the collar of his ceremonial robe. "Of course I do," he answered. "I'm an important man—"

"A _very _important man," Sokka agreed sagely. "A very important _wealthy _man. Tell me, Mr. Bei Fong—would it be completely out of the realm of possibility for someone to want to…" He trailed off, shook his head, and ventured at last, "…to hurt your family?"

Lao's eyes flicked to Poppy, to Toph. Beads of sweat the size of coins sprang into existence across his upper lip. Licking them away, he coughed into his sleeve. "It is not an impossible idea."

"Avatar Aang?" Sokka looked again at the world's savior. "It goes without saying you have enemies too."

"Well, sure," Aang admitted, vestiges of panic and confusion still warring over his open face. "I mean, not everyone hated Ozai—"

"And you turned him into a noodle, so yeah, that rubbed a few people the wrong way," the tribesman declared. "Toph, you and I helped Aang and pretty much still do, what with keeping the peace and all. That means there are individuals out there who don't like _us _very much either."

"Everyone has enemies, young man," reproached Lao. "What does that have to do with all this?" He gestured angrily to the garden: the guests, the streamers, the uncomfortable outfits.

"Everything," Sokka supplied. "_Everything_. While it's true pretty much anyone can throw a stone and hit a foe, how many people can say they share a common enemy?" Turning to look in what he hoped was a thoughtful manner at the crowd, he persisted quietly, "And how many people would like to see the Bei Fong family, the Avatar, and the Southern Water Tribe's highest-ranking diplomat humiliated in one fell swoop?"

Quiet stretched its fingers over the lawn—faces in the crowd paled or darkened as the clouds overhead moved obliviously across the sky's bowl. Feeling the suspicion fester, Sokka suggested, "Let's see if we can craft a scenario for that sort of group humiliation, shall we? Toph, you wrote a letter to Aang asking for marriage help, right? In the interest of bringing honor to your respected parents, you requested the Avatar's aid in finding a suitable husband."

Toph's mouth twitched. Technically it was true. "Yes."

Rubbing his chin, Sokka hedged, "Suppose that letter was intercepted by an enemy—our common enemy, even. Suppose that enemy altered the letter. Suppose he—or she—corrected it to indicate to Aang that Toph was interested not just in finding a husband, but in having _me _as her husband, and that I had already said yes." Thumping his chest, he went on, "Avatar Aang, did you receive a letter that said as much? And did you take it in good faith that Toph, who you know is by nature an honest person, had told you nothing but the truth?"

"Err—yeah," Aang affirmed.

"And Toph"—Sokka rounded on his best friend—"when Aang arrived and announced to you and your parents that he would be delighted to present me as your husband, that he was _thrilled_ for the chance to act as a witness on your wedding day… you must have assumed, despite your surprise at his choice, that Aang had simply done what you requested and found you a suitable match. And you probably next determined, for the sake of his hard work and the patience and honor of your parents, to agree with the Avatar's choice. To defend it. To ultimately go through with the wedding."

Toph said nothing. Her shoulders, though, visibly trembled. Her hands clenched into fists—her chest hitched, and the garden as a whole undulated faintly.

Poppy Bei Fong, misinterpreting her daughter's urge to kill as embarrassment, choked out, "Oh, _Toph_," and stepped to envelop the girl in a quivery embrace. Similarly moved, her husband groped for the blind Earthbender's shoulder and squeezed it.

Sokka allowed the trio a moment of familial anguish. He also privately enjoyed the scarecrow way Toph's arms stuck out from the parental pretzel like little brittle sticks.

"I received a letter four days ago," he admitted when Poppy loosened her grip a bit, "and I have no idea who wrote it." And really—he didn't have the slightest clue. "But it seemed to be from Toph, and it was urgent: it instructed me to be here by the solstice at the latest. Now I know why." Pulling the glasses from their perch on his nose, he folded them, tucked them back inside his vest, and summated, "Someone wanted to make fools of us all. They're probably watching us right now."

Hundreds of attendees in the garden exchanged wary glances. Sokka wiped the back of his neck. It was very warm.

"Well," spat Lao miserably, clutching at his child and glaring out across the crowd, "they succeeded, didn't they?"

Sokka resisted the urge to crack his knuckles. _All right, Plan Guy. Time to tie it all together now._

"Actually," he provided, "I see this as more of an opportunity than a failure."

Lifting her teary face from Toph's hair, Poppy sniffed, "Opportunity?"

The tribesman spread his hands and made a show of looking around at the assembly. "Yes ma'am," he responded. "Given the current atmosphere, I think now is the perfect time for me to talk to you about marrying your daughter."


	8. To Point B

**Commentary: **Sorry this is late! Prior obligations made it so. I hope the lapse, however, was worth it, and I also hope there aren't too many mistakes. Because I'm posting this from a borrowed smartphone I can't check things over too long. If you see anything amiss, please note me. I will fix it as soon as possible.

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER EIGHT: …To Point B**

_**or**_

**Sokka Takes It Home**

* * *

Lao blinked at Sokka, incredulous. "You—you actually _want _to marry Toph?"

The Tsungi horn player exhaled sharply; the hoarse _blat _of the instrument rang out across the garden, and Sokka shook his head. "I want to marry," he corrected, "a strong, loyal woman who will help me do what I love doing—keep the peace, spank the occasional Fire Nation coup instigator… you know how it is."

The look on Lao's face suggested that no, actually, he did _not _know how it was, and Sokka hurried on, "I want to marry someone who isn't selfish—someone who cares about family, and building bridges, and doing the right thing—"

He stopped. He looked at Toph, whose expression was as blank and unreadable as a stream-worn stone: at her hands, clenched into hard little nubby boulders hovering nearby her hips. Whether it was part of his plan or not, Sokka found himself smiling.

"I want to marry someone _like _Toph," he finished. "The addition of an Earthbender with such prodigious talent from an equally prodigious family would be nothing but positive for me and mine." Steepling his fingers together, the tribesman surveyed his best friend's parents, tipped his head, and turned on his most charming simper. "With that being said, I think I could also offer you and yours a sizable"—it took all the strength in the world for Sokka not to wiggle his eyebrows—"benefit. As Avatar Aang has doubtless told you, my job posting is honorable. My political reach is long. And my salary is on the upper end of ridiculous." He nodded to the older man, whose eyes took on the telltale glitter of pride when Sokka amended, "Though it's most likely not comparable to your yearly earnings, Mr. Bei Fong."

Again he paused, letting the words—letting the _idea_—sink in. He turned his face heavenward. The sun warmed his cheeks, the breeze ghosted beneath his chin in a caress, and the bright blue brilliance of the sky seemed to grin at him as he took a breath, hooked his hands behind his back, and counted. _One… two… three… _

On six, he ventured, "Would you be opposed to me marrying your daughter, esteemed Bei Fongs? As much as I appreciate Avatar Aang's efforts in securing your blessing for me once already, I feel it's only appropriate to ask for myself this time."

Lao and Poppy Bei Fong exchanged a look—the long, measured sort that parents typically share when attempting to determine a punishment for a misbehaving child. The elder merchant's mouth tightened. His wife's throat worked. In the nearest tree a finch twittered out a few bars of woodsong, and at the end of that melody Toph's father allowed, "We would not be opposed."

Sokka made a bow to the couple. "I am honored," he assured them, and he was. Lifting a finger, he put forward, "There's just one problem."

"Pray tell us what _that _might be," Lao sighed.

"Well," said the tribesman, "it's logistics, sir. My job requires extensive travel—I can't stay here in Gaoling, at least not for very long. And while tradition might typically dictate in this instance that Toph give up her profession in favor of supporting mine, she is, as I understand it, a lynchpin in the official intercessions between the Earth Kingdom and other peoples. She can't quit"—nor would she want to quit, but Sokka left out that part—"and that means she has her own obligations to fulfill across the world." With a frown, he concluded, "A marriage is nothing if the participants are always apart. Such divergent schedules would require copious amounts of preparation and negotiation to mesh. I have made none of those preparations or negotiations. And as Toph was misled, I don't think she's made any either—at least, not the correct ones. Am I right?"

Lao wiped his gleaming brow with a sleeve and nodded, the motion entirely fatigued. "Yes, young man, you _are_ right. We raised these concerns before with your apparent matchmaker"—Aang had the courtesy to blush—"and were assured steps had already been taken to… what were your words, Avatar Aang? Ah yes. 'Weave your lives together'—that's what he said."

Sokka's eyebrow twitched. "Poetic"—_That little bald jerk! I knew he was up to something! Going around winking at people, Spirits; who does he think he is?_—"but unfortunately untrue. It's unthinkable we marry today: neither of us are professionally ready for it. If this union is to _ever _occur, other measures must be put into motion—_real _preparations must happen. Preferably"—and Sokka fetched a faux-suspicious glance at the crowd—"without the use of messenger hawks that might be intercepted again by those who only wish to see us suffer."

Poppy too scowled at the wedding guests. "That goes without saying."

"What do you suggest?" pursued her husband.

Sokka pretended to think about it. It made for a fantastic show: he paced before the altar, muttering to himself. He tugged his wolftail. He stopped at the buffet table, sampled a sip of the finest whisky there, cleared his throat to disguise an impressed cough, and finally offered, hoping his nose wasn't running too much, "A field trip."

"What?" That was Lao.

"A field trip. An _excursion_"—Sokka whirled to face the two elder Bei Fongs—"in the name of diplomacy and our potential future family. Allow Toph and I to travel with each other. Allow us to attempt to indeed weave our lives together"—Toph's eyebrows shot up; if possible, Aang looked smug—"by keeping company as we re-stitch the wounds of this ravaged world closed again." _That's right, Aang. Leave the poetry to me_. "Give us time to determine how the marriage will work. And rest easy knowing that we will be chaperoned every step of the way"—Sokka indicated his target with a grand flourish—"by the Avatar himself."

Aang blinked. Lao and Poppy looked at each other again. Toph—of course—stared at nothing.

"Of course," Sokka allowed in the stunned silence of the moment, "I would send a monthly installment of a bride price until the wedding _did _take place."

"And when would that be exactly?" demanded Poppy, dissolving the contemplative quiet. "Your actual wedding day? We can't let the two of you determine that."

_Spirits forbid two perfectly independent and capable people decide when to join together in blessed matrimony_, Sokka thought. Aloud he provided, "The Avatar is among the most spiritual and auspicious of all beings on this planet. Given that and the fact he will directly witness our courtship, why not let him decide and provide an exact date when he believes the time is right?"

Lao's eyes flew to Aang. "Avatar Aang? You would agree to this arrangement?"

The monk grinned and nodded eagerly. "Sure! I'd be happy to keep an eye on them. If you like, I mean, I could even write you regular progress reports. I have my own personal flying lemur, you know—he can't travel as often as messenger hawks do, but he also doesn't respond to bribes."

The finch sang again. Plucking a thread from the hem of his sleeve, Lao Bei Fong cleared his throat, exhaled slowly, and looked at Poppy through his lashes. Maybe a kind of communication passed between them—Sokka couldn't tell and might have missed it even if they'd started yelling, his heartbeat a sawing roar in his ears.

In the end, it was the merchant who spoke first.

"You understand," the eldest Bei Fong told the warrior firmly, "we will not wait decades for the announcement of a wedding day—"

"We do _eventually_ want grandchildren," Poppy put in.

"—but we realize," growled Lao, "because of the precarious nature of politics, that this arrangement will take some time. We will allow you that: _some _time. It would be in your best interest to marry sooner than later, lest that soon-to-be-negotiated monthly bride price you mentioned"—he eyed Sokka sternly—"leaves your coffers empty." With the smallest and most reluctant of bows, the man concluded, "We will talk further later. But you have our blessing."

Aang beamed. In the crowd a child whooped—the breeze sighed over the garden, and someone nearby the fore of the party muttered, "Maybe we can finally get some food now, geez."

With a mental celebratory fistpump, Sokka turned to his best friend—

Where the Earthbender had once stood there was now only a circle of churned lawn and sprayed soil.

Toph had gone.


	9. Contents May Explode Under Pressure

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER NINE: Contents May Explode Under Pressure**

_**or**_

**Sokka Gets What He Deserves**

* * *

He found her outside the estate wall, her back to the party—and to him.

Cautiously Sokka approached his best friend, nervously plucking Appa-hairs from his vest. He stopped when he came within touching distance, though he kept his hands to himself and instead stared at her shoulders, their lines—so straight and sturdy—squared against him, covered too in a fine film of the garden's loam. Her dress was more brown than yellow now. A snarl of roots crowned her right ear, and something that looked suspiciously like an earthworm fell from her hair and disappeared into the grass.

Sokka cleared his throat.

Toph made no sound.

"Look," he began, and stopped, because that was probably the stupidest thing anyone could ever say to Toph. Slapping his hand to his forehead, he backtracked and attempted again, "_Listen_, Toph, I'm sorry—but you didn't, you know, _tell me _about any of this and I didn't have a lot of time to plan much, and I…"

The breeze stirred, bringing with it the voices of the wedding guests all blended together: some joyful, some exasperated, some too muted to tell. The hem of Toph's dress eddied in the questing currents, and as the fabric drew tight over her flesh Sokka saw that she was stiff as a stone statue, she was inhumanly rock, she was _granite_—

"I did what I thought you would like," he heard himself saying. "I mean, it'll be like old times, won't it? You and me and Aang and Katara, all of us traveling together again, visiting far-off places, fixing stuff... Spirits, we could even go bug Zuko, get him to shoot some fireballs at us or something. We'll hardly be able to tell the difference. And his wife, you know, the knife lady—she doesn't like me anyway and I'm pretty sure she'd throw some sharp pointy stuff if we asked—"

A clump of dirt on Toph's neck dissolved into fragments and fell between them in a scatter.

Biting off his words, Sokka hesitated, then stepped around Toph and finally paused in front of her, studying her face. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was a line, pale—she'd scrubbed off the paint—and finite. Across one rounded cheekbone lanced the green bolt of a grass stain.

"Toph, c'mon," he whispered. "Talk to me."

"Thank you," she said.

Sokka blinked. In the millisecond it took him to survey the backs of his eyelids, Toph stepped forward, wrapped her arms around him, and planted her face in his chest. Her chin was hard and the embrace she clenched about him even harder; her fingers dug into his spine, nails scuttering over the rough fabric there.

"Thank you," she said again, muffled and hoarse. "Sokka"—the tribesman's heart lurched; was her voice actually _breaking_?—"thank you, thank you, _thank you_." Her hands tightened, groped, clutched at him. "Also," she husked, "I'm a little sorry for this."

"For wha—"

Toph drove a knee directly into his crotch.


	10. Message Received

**Commentary: **Wasn't able to post this yesterday. My apologies! I hope the wait was worth it.

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER TEN: Message Received**

_**or**_

**Toph Gets What She Wants **

* * *

Sokka came to the abrupt conclusion that Toph's knee was the hardest surface on the planet.

"Nnngh!" he opined. His ankles trembled, went to water; suddenly rubber, his legs seesawed sideways and then he was eating grass next to Toph's dirt-scuffed toes. A ball of hot needles crawled in his belly. Curling into himself, he took a few personal moments to writhe miserably across the lawn.

"Finished?" Toph asked at length.

Blinking back tears, Sokka chanced a glance up at his best friend. "Y-yeah," he grunted. "Help me up?" He lifted quivering arms and wiggled the fingertips pitifully.

With a sigh, Toph knelt. "Wimp," she accused.

Hefted aright in her iron grip's merciless circle, Sokka—somewhat squeakily—wondered, "Are hugs from you always going to hurt this much? You should let me know now. I'll start carrying around bruise balm or something—"

"Don't make it sound like this is gonna happen regularly," scolded the Earthbender. Her hair scrubbed along his vest and left behind a dark, crumbling streak.

"Well, it might." Sokka sniffed. "You smell like a flowerpot."

"I consider that a compliment. What do you mean, it might? Here, you've got it"—he was on his own feet again, albeit unsteadily—"let go."

Toph made to pull away. Draping himself against her, though, Sokka hooked an elbow at the hinge of her narrow waist and kept her clutched close. "Nuh-uh. Hold still a sec." As the unmistakable sound of the wind ensemble rippled over the wall, he insisted, "Let's, you know, _try_. You wanted to"—over her hip he jiggled his fingers—"and if I'd hated the idea I wouldn't have incurred your wrath to the point of you crushing my nuts, so…"

He left off a breath. Under his touch Toph felt like a stalactite. "Yeah," he finished. "Hugs. Get used to 'em." And despite the risk of getting his tender areas pulverized a second time, he tucked his cheek down into Toph's hair. He tugged her stiff form as near as she could come.

He held her.

A moment passed. Two.

Gradually the spiky nub of Toph's elbow in his spleen shifted, subsided. Sokka watched, mesmerized, as her cheek descended to his shoulder, touched it, compressed there. She sighed. Over her face the shadows of her lashes shuttered and slipped, and she said, "You smell like Appa."

"Didn't have time to scrub," he informed her seriously. "I was late for my own wedding. And besides"—he gave her a gentle prod—"you seem to be getting pretty comfy there."

Toph's face splotched a sunrise of pinks. "I'm _trying_," she snarled.

"You're snuggling," corrected Sokka. Before she could thrust a fist somewhere vulnerable, he added, "Isn't it nice?"

Her lack of immediate violence suggested maybe she thought so.

They rested a while, quiet. The nervous adrenaline that had kept Sokka in fine form before Toph's parents dwindled to nothing, leaving his limbs heavy and his thoughts contentedly sluggish. For her part, Toph made no move to escape his grasp. Sometime between the distant clocktower's chime of mid-afternoon and the start of the wind ensemble's horrible second set, she twisted her fingers in the seam of his vest.

"Sokka," she murmured eventually. "Why'd you do this?"

Flicking his eyes to Toph, Sokka smiled. "First," he suggested, "let's have a seat." Tugging her elbow, he settled in the grass and drew her down with him, rearranging his arm around her as he did so. He took her minute grumbling as a good sign that his more bruisable areas were—at least temporarily—safe.

"Right," he began at last. "So. All this. Why I did it. That's what we're hashing out now, uh-huh?"

"Yeah, take some pity on the blind kid, okay? I couldn't see it when you, you know, lost your mind completely." Toph's voice fell to a mumble. "Not that I don't appreciate it."

A cricket close by provided a stirring chitter. Shifting his weight such that Toph was encouraged to lean in a little, Sokka groped for what he wanted to say. When he found it, he started, "Well—earlier, okay. You were talking about how you'd never said anything about liking me because you were twelve and then I was with Suki, and we're best friends and you were afraid of destroying what we have—"

"I never said that!"

"Yeah, but"—and Sokka squeezed the Earthbender a bit—"you meant it anyway. You _did_," he maintained as Toph recoiled slightly. "Don't try to say you didn't, because I almost lost you once and it was the scariest thing I've ever been through, and I don't think we'd be friends at all if you didn't feel just a _teensy _bit afraid of losing me too, whether it's to a giant war or some stupid fight over who likes who more. Okay?"

"…fine," acknowledged Toph.

"All right." Sokka nodded. "All right, good. So anyway, you were talking about how you'd never gotten a chance with me because of those things, and then suddenly you just, geez, turned all _not _Toph on me and pretty much gave up before the fight even started, you know? You were ready to have me treat you like a jerk at the altar so you could get rid of your parents and get over me at the same time—so you could just, wow, feel sorry for yourself and have everyone else feel sorry for you too, and that?" He slammed his fist down hard into the grass. "That's not—that _wasn't fair_."

Bristling and open-mouthed, Toph nevertheless kept silent.

"So I thought to myself, hey"—and Sokka scowled at his best friend—"since Toph never apparently considered _my _feelings or how _I _might handle the situation, let me just Sokka-fy things and _fix them_."

"Your feelings?" demanded the girl wedged against him. "_What _feel—"

"Like you said, you were twelve," Sokka interrupted fiercely, and punched the ground again. The impact both hurt his fist and drove Toph into startled quiet. "I was with Suki," he revisited. "And we've been best friends since pretty much forever. I never thought you'd give me the time of _day _when it came to romance. Spirits, Toph, I never thought about it _period_: never believed you would think about _me _that way, never thought of _you _that way."

Toph flinched. Softening his voice, Sokka continued, "Was that insensitive and unobservant on my part, ruling you out without consideration? Yeah, _probably_, but I'm a little slow on the uptake and we've established that I had a girlfriend then and you were still a kid, so hey, it wasn't like I was doing it because you aren't awesome or anything." Sucking in a breath to stop the stammer, the warrior concluded, "You aren't a kid anymore, Toph, and I don't have a girlfriend either, and now I know that wow, you do find my scrawny Water Tribe butt worthy of your romantic attentions. And rather than letting me react to what all those things might mean together, you made these stupid pity-me plans"—he shook her, ginger—"without asking whether I might want a chance with _you_." Lifting his eyebrows, he posed, "How is that fair?"

In the fiery glare of the afternoon he watched Toph's throat bob and tremble—watched her mouth curl, flatten, smooth again. Courage kindled bronze in her eyes or maybe it was the light, Sokka wasn't sure, and she asked, "_Do_ you want a chance with me?"

Scratching contemplatively at the back of his head, Sokka mused, "Well, I just scammed your parents, implicated hundreds of high-ranking government officials in a scandal that doesn't exist, sacrificed a sizable portion of my salary, and agreed to marry you within the next few years, all in the hope that you'll come have crazy-cool adventures with me in the meantime." He paused, reached down to brush a clump of dirt from Toph's stained cheek. "What does that sound like to you?" he wondered.

Pushing her face into his palm, Toph punched him—so gently Sokka almost cried—and whispered back, "Geez. You could've just said yes."

"Gonna give it to me, then?" he pursued. "That chance?"

Toph shrugged. Pulling her head back from the cage of his fingers, she flopped against him, her jab into his kidney the most natural thing in the world, and said, "Why not?"

Surveying his apparent new fiancée, Sokka found himself abruptly possessed of the desire to engage in the ritual most couples do when interested in cementing their affections. He cupped his arm tight around Toph—he leaned over her, coaxing her head aloft with the ridge of his shoulder. His nose brushed the snub of hers and he parted his lips to—

"Sokka?" she interrupted.

"Mmnuh?"

Smirking into his chin, Toph informed him, "I was wrong. You smell like jerky."


	11. Pending Correspondence

**Commentary: **Really quick addition here. =)

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER ELEVEN: Pending Correspondence**

**or**

**Away They Go**

* * *

They walked back to the party hand in hand, mostly for show and maybe a tiny bit because they wanted to, and went they got there they found Aang waiting at the gate. Without missing a step, Toph punched him in the stomach.

"Hey!" Sokka whined as the Avatar slumped to his knees and tried desperately to suck in a little of the air he was so adept at Bending. "Why didn't you get _him _in the nuts?"

Upon hearing that query, Aang covered the anatomy in question and wheezed, "I beg you to spare them, Sifu Toph!"

"Like you have any," growled the Earthbender. Hauling up Aang by the front of his robes with her free hand, she snarled into his face, "But speaking of your mystic manhood, Twinkletoes… the next time you abandon _any _plan of mine, I'll make sure there's never a chance of another Airbender around here. Got it?" She gave the youth a shake for good measure. "Say those words I long to hear."

"Yes ma'am," meekly replied the world's savior.

Toph nodded. Releasing Aang, she worried her fingers a moment in Sokka's, cocked her head toward the wedding assembly—listened. A moment later she decided, "Right. Let's drink some tea, eat some cake, and blow this joint. Sound good?"

"I like cake," Sokka affirmed.

Aang—somewhat breathlessly—agreed, "There's a _giant _chocolate one."

Toph smirked. "Excellent."

Three hours and nearly an entire buffet table of sweets later, Toph hugged her parents goodbye and climbed aboard Appa at the fore of the Bei Fong estate. Sokka too embraced his in-laws, enduring Poppy's exuberant tears and the bony prickle of Lao's chin in his shoulder. "Take care of my daughter," the merchant whispered into the narrow hollow of the tribesman's neck, "or I'll take care of you, young man. No matter your company." He shot Aang a meaningful look.

Sokka promised, "I will." He meant it and perhaps Lao believed him, but even so the man refused to smile.

Appa climbed heavenward and Toph leaned into Sokka as the stars loomed overhead like lanterns, the absence of a saddle encouraging her arms tight about his elbow. The breezes pulled at them. Toph's sleeves puffed and fluttered, and Aang glided nearby in the speckled darkness, his hum faint but firm in the wind's soft bower.

"Hey," said Toph as the moon soared up the sky's rungs. In its light her face was a pale circle, her eyes emblazoned pewter and her smile a rill of shadow beneath them. "Snoozles?"

"Mmhm?" asked Sokka.

"What if this doesn't work?"

"This?"

"Yeah. This—us."

Appa exhaled beneath them—they sloped sideways a little, and Sokka took the opportunity to sidle closer to Toph. Noting too the tightening of her arms against his, he observed, "Oh, I dunno." He nudged an elbow into her ribs. "But I'm the plan guy, right? If anything happens, I'll think of something."

Aang's silhouette knifed over them. Shrugging down under Sokka's shoulder, Toph acknowledged, "Okay."


	12. Sincerely Yours

**Commentary**: Another really quick addition. Pinched for time—sorry, everyone! But I did say snippets would usually be short, so... =)

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER TWELVE: Sincerely Yours**

_**or**_

**Out With the Old**

* * *

When the shadows of the trees stretched long, like fingers, over the ground so far beneath them, Sokka ushered Appa down and they made camp together, the three of them. It was a process that took approximately fifteen seconds, given that there was no need for a fire—they were all full, and it was warm—or shelter. Toph scuffed a heel in the low grass of the clearing Aang had chosen, proclaimed it, "Nice," and walked to the middle of it. There she tore off her dress.

_SSSSSHRIP! _The garment exploded at the shoulders first—Toph rolled them, took hold of her collar's fabric, and yanked. As those seams gave way she twisted her hips too, absurdly graceful, her body rippling in a contortion Ty Lee might have found enviable. A strap ruptured: forcing her other hand down the front of the dress, Toph grunted. She groped for and found the threaded cluster of the bodice's hem. She pulled it. First straight down her abdomen and then jaggedly along her side the dress shredded. A cream-colored button popped from its moorings and sailed gleefully off into the night.

Toph straightened. In the fall of moonlight through the trees her shoulders moved like mounds of marble, and she peeled away the remnants of the dress as she might a lychee nut's clinging husk. When there was nothing left of it to prize free, she dropped the fabric and stomped on the bedraggled clump it made on the clearing floor. Overhead leaves rustled, a catowl hooted, and the earth yawned lazily open to swallow the ruined garment whole.

Aang and Sokka stared.

Eventually, though, the latter broke from his stupor and seized Toph's meager bag from Appa's back. Rifling through it, he came across a rough tunic and rougher breeches, the first a homespun tan and the second such an indiscernible brown Sokka was reminded of soil. He crossed the clearing in three paces and provided these selections to Toph, who fingered them, unfolded them, and finally shrugged into both expressionlessly.

There was a creak from behind them—Sokka checked it. He caught a glimpse of Aang flitting away into the sky again on his glider.

Thus left alone—well and _truly _alone; there was no Tsungi horn here to disrupt their conversation—with his best friend, Sokka sighed.

Instantly Toph rounded on him. There was nothing inherently threatening about the way she turned to face him, much less the tip of her head toward his in summer's still air. The finger she tapped against his chest, though, suggested its owner could—_would_—break worlds if given reason.

"Got something to say?" she asked.

Sokka considered. He looked at Toph—at their surroundings, painted silver and still but for the fringe of a single yellow sleeve struggling up through the rumpled grass.

"Well," said Sokka, "normally I'd tell you that littering is a bad thing, but this time"—and he covered the sleeve with his boot—"I think it's perfectly acceptable."


	13. Warmest Regards

**Commentary**: My kingdom for a chance to post updates! Sorry this one was delayed, but here ya go!

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Warmest Regards**

_**or**_

**In With the New**

* * *

Sokka realized two things about being engaged almost immediately after Appa touched down at his doorstep in Ba Sing Se.

The first was that he wasn't going to be given the opportunity to announce his new non-single status when he saw fit. Having arrived a few hours before Sokka and Toph thanks to his speedy little glider, Aang had already taken it upon himself to act as Sokka's personal messenger boy by bestowing the news upon Katara. As Sokka slid down Appa's flank and found his feet once more on the Earth Kingdom capital's sandy soil, he discovered that very woman waiting for him.

Katara did not look pleased.

"I hear you went and got yourself married," she said. She folded her arms. The fountain nearby their neighborhood's center square suddenly spurted three-foot-long icicles of varying degrees of sharpness.

Katara, Sokka reflected, looked _pissed_.

"Engaged," he corrected her gingerly. "I got _engaged_. I'm not married. I mean, not yet—"

"Engaged," attempted his baby sister, rolling the word over on her tongue as she might a special beverage. Her lips parted—she licked her teeth, a severe snap of white in her otherwise soft cinnamon face. "_Engaged_," she tried again. Behind her the icicles in the fountain crunched and crackled outward, groping like fingernails.

Instinct drove Sokka back against Appa's undulating ribs. "Eee-yeeeah—"

"ENGAGED!" snarled Katara. The word thundered across the residential street—passersby previously preoccupied with the fountain turned to eye the angry Waterbender and her cowering sibling. Stabbing a finger into the empty air between them, Katara resumed, "Engaged to _TOPH_?"

_Fwump_! From the corner of his eye Sokka saw the Earthbender in question land at his side, legs akimbo, expression inscrutable. She blinked, tipped her head—said nothing. Across Appa's fur her fingers provided idle strokes, and Sokka heard himself say as he watched those rough little digits dip and dart through the coarse white mat, "Sure." He tacked on, simultaneously thoughtless and decided, "Seriously, Katara, who else?"

Toph's hand stilled. Startled, Katara paused. Someone out of sight shouted an enthusiastic, "_You know that's right_!"

The voice responsible for the shout sounded suspiciously like Aang's.

Collecting herself, Katara threw up her hands. "Did you _ask her first_, Sokka?" she demanded. "Did you, oh, I don't know, run it by her before you dragged her into your _scheme_?"

Sokka defended, "It was a good scheme! And hey, she dragged _me _into _her _scheme first, so—"

"Did you"—by now the architectural structure of the fountain was lost in the burgeoning cluster of icicles; some of those were taller than the neighborhood awnings and still spiking skyward—"ask _her _to marry you? Before you asked her parents? Before you, wow, sealed the whole deal up in a pretty little envelope and got her into a situation that entails sticking around with _you _for the rest of her life?"

Sokka blinked. "You say that like I'm bad company or something," he observed.

"…you didn't ask her, did you?" Katara's eyebrow gave a pulsing, quivery twitch.

"_Am _I bad company?" pursued the tribesman. He turned to look at Toph, whose face was still locked in its usual mask of bored indifference—he gesticulated desperately at an adjacent vendor who, clutching at an armful of cabbages, inched away from him. "I always thought I was a pretty fun guy! Life of the party! The _comic relief_, even—"

"You didn't ask her." Katara buried her face in her hands. The icicles on the fountain cracked, crumbled into bits. Those bits wafted harmlessly down along the street like snowflakes and more than a few people reached up, wondering at the sight of such in summer, to pluck at them. One found Toph's cheek, stuck there. It melted. Running down her face next, reminiscent of a tear, it teased the corner of her mouth and she licked it away, smacking her lips appreciatively at the cold.

"You don't understand, Katara." Sokka carefully approached his sister. He extended his arms as though he meant to hug her, and maybe that _was _his plan. "There just wasn't _time_—"

In a motion as fluid as the medium of her Bending, Katara reached up, grabbed Sokka's chin, and hauled him in close. Pinching that wedge of his jaw between her thumb and forefinger, she shook him. Once. Twice. His head nodded on his neck and the neighbors stared and Katara, so furious and indignant her voice nearly broke, hissed at him, "Sokka, how could you? Toph's feelings—don't tell me you don't _know_; don't tell me you could just overlook—"

She stopped abruptly, sucked in a breath, and made to say something else when a pale hand interceded between the Waterbender and her sibling. It furled over dark fingers, plucked them away one by one—ultimately its efforts freed Sokka. As the tribesman straightened, the arm belonging to the pale hand hooked about his waist and Toph, sighing, ducked under his elbow. She held on to him for approximately two seconds before shoving him away again, this time to enfold Katara in a tangle of limbs. She shoved her face—mistakenly—into Katara's breasts, flushed, shifted her cheek aside, and ended with her brow tucked to the taller girl's collarbone. Over her spine Katara's hands gave a startled flare, then settled.

"He didn't know, actually, because he has a brain the size of a pebble"—Toph said this succinctly—"but he does now, and he did the best he could and I'm _glad_, and as much as I appreciate all your righteous indignation on my behalf, Sweetness, you've gotta cut it out or I'm seriously going to just throw up sparkles all over you. Okay?" Sensing Katara's bristle and predictable retort, Toph tightened her arms to proceed, "Besides, you know something?"

Mouth a dubious crescent, Katara arched her brows. Leaning back in the loop of the Waterbender's arms, Toph grinned, thumbed over her shoulder at Sokka, and provided, "It's not your job to take care of me anymore. It's _his_. And do you know what that means?"

"Cosmic intervention to keep you alive and not imprisoned come your next birthday," opined Katara dryly.

"Hey!" Sokka squawked.

"Exactly," allowed Toph, and the tribesman goggled at her, wounded. "He's gonna need all the help he can get," his fiancée continued peaceably, "and that includes yours. So it would be _really _great if you two could, you know, not fight. For," she stressed as Katara's cheeks puffed with a cross reply, "_my _benefit. Unless, of course"—her voice dropped in feigned insecurity; her arms loosened—"you don't want me to eventually be your sister."

Never could it be said that Katara was an uncaring or unreasonable person, especially when it came to her friends and family. Deflating, she jerked a nod. She dropped her face into Toph's windblown hair, dragging the smaller woman close. The two Benders tenderly embraced and it provided the onlookers—of which there were now several—a moment of soft, cuddlesome warmth.

But then Katara gasped, thrust Toph out to arm's length, and said weakly as her face lost all its color, "Oh Spirits. You're eventually going to be my _sister_."

Toph smiled. It was a wicked, wicked smile. Turning to point her face in Sokka's general direction, she motioned gently to Katara, cocked her head, and wiggled her eyebrows. "Your move," she told him.

The second thing Sokka realized about being engaged was that it meant he now had a partner with whom teasing his sister was always going to be an absolute success.

That epiphany was better than meat.


	14. Insert Mail Metaphor Here

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Insert Mail Metaphor Here**

_**or**_

**Sokka Learns the Value of Sharing**

* * *

Dinner was an affair that, after four days of nothing but jerky and dandelion salad, Toph and Sokka demolished heartily. Settled at a long, wide table in the diplomats' quarters the Avatar's cohort had been provided by the Earth King's hospitality, they clinked mugs, seized utensils, and tore into the fare. Around them Katara huffed and bustled, still aggravated by what her mutters pegged as "Sokka's harebrained ideas"—Aang's soft laughter soared to the rafters, and eventually he distracted the disgruntled Waterbender with wandering fingers and faux-innocent eyelash flutters.

Toph, though, was the one who placated Katara completely, and she did it with such flawless ease that both Sokka and Aang felt compelled to kowtow. "Oh man," groaned the Earthbender as she sank her teeth into a warm, buttery croissant, "I _really_ missed your cooking, Sweetness." She cemented the validity of this statement by cramming the remainder of the croissant into her mouth. Crumbs sprayed. Toph's eyelids shuddered, seamed; her shoulders gave a convulsion of delight.

Surprised and flattered by the rare compliment from Toph, Katara smiled and tucked her pinked face to Aang's shining pate. "It's nothing," she demurred. The fight bled from her as infection bleeds from a flushed suture.

"Really? Huh." Toph cocked her head, considering, and snapped a hand out before Sokka, the palm up. She wiggled its fingers demonstratively. "Pass me another of those nothings then, Snoozles. Make it quick. Don't skimp"—she said this seriously, at least—"I'll kill you."

Sokka handed her the basket of croissants. She took four, one between each of her fingers. She set about dunking them in the dregs of the stew Katara had prepared for the evening (it was something full of potatoes and carrots—Toph's favorite), making small sounds of pleasure as she tore them apart and ate them bit by bit. Yellow specks poured down her front and fanned across the surface of the table. When the croissants proper were gone, the Earthbender swept up those specks and devoured them too, shameless, licking clean the creases and tips of her fingers.

Sokka, for his part, ravaged mercilessly the haunch of the jack-antelope Katara had dressed and roasted especially for him. He ripped free the crisp outer flesh, growling in satisfaction as it first crunched under and then melted against his teeth. He wrenched at the juicy, stringy tissue revealed next, slurping up the oils and gravy that managed to escape his lips and run down his chin. He was gnawing the bone at the core of the haunch when Katara, disgusted, professed to the room's comfortable quiet, "Geez, you two really are perfect for each other."

Typically not one to entertain conversation while he was eating, Sokka nevertheless looked up—and only because Toph had paused too. Cheeks puffed out, mouth full, the younger woman demanded, "What do you mean?" It sounded more like _whadojoo'een_; a new confetti of crumbs exploded across the table, and Sokka chuckled.

"Sokka, you have sauce on your face and you didn't even leave any of the haunch for Toph," sighed Katara. Rounding on the Earthbender, she scolded gently, "And Toph, you're…" She trailed off as the smaller Bender wiped her mouth with her collar. "Well," she resumed, "you're _destroying _that shirt—"

"It's an ugly shirt."

"Regardless, it's not something you—hey! You don't know it's ugly!"

"Now I do," Toph corrected, and belched.

"You two are _animals_," finished Katara, flinching away.

Sokka shrugged. Toph did too, then blinked and turned her face in the tribesman's direction, her gaze suddenly sharp and predatory. "Wait," she voiced. "Wait just a sec, damnit. There was a haunch?"

Dropping the bone of the thing in question back onto his plate such that it clattered, Sokka smirked. He patted his belly. The vibrations of the action rippled down the bench to Toph, who scowled. "Was," agreed Sokka. Smug, he picked at a shred in his teeth. "It was absolutely delicious, too. _Succulent_."

"What kind of haunch was it?"

"I dunno," he supplied, "but it was tender and _tangy _and—"

Toph scooted down the bench toward him, _ssssshk_. Before he could finish describing the wondrous attributes of his main meal, her hands climbed into his vision and locked fast about his cheeks. The clamping pressure inspired from the tribesman a particularly girly yelp. Pitiless, she pulled him down a few inches, smacked her foot against the stone floor beneath the table—presumably to get a better look at him—and finally affixed her mouth to his chin.

Her tongue ghosted over his flesh and Sokka was only vaguely aware of the room's sudden, suffocating quiet.

He tipped his head as much as he could in her grasp, feeling her nails scrape his cheekbones. Her lips slid over his skin, wet and soft; her breath tickled his mouth and her palm scrubbed his jaw, dragging him almost into her—

"You jerk," she snarled into the well of his neck. She planted her hand in the center of his chest and shoved him backward, a dab of the haunch's sauce still glistening on her upper lip like a little red button. "That _was _delicious! Katara!" Toph spun to where she thought the Waterbender was perched, ignoring Sokka as he fell off the bench and landed unceremoniously on the floor below, limbs akimbo, eyes enormous. "How could you only make _one_ of those? I'll probably never"—already her small grubby hands were working across the table again, seeking out the next dish—"forgive you for that."

"Sorry," said Katara numbly, her eyes rooted on her brother.

Coming across a plateful of sesame cake, Toph produced a sound of sheer glee and dragged it within devouring distance. Her shirt was immediately festooned with a new layer of crumbs and tiny translucent seeds. "You'd better be," she huffed, and went on in muffled euphoria, "Spirits, this is probably the best thing _ever_."

Mute, Sokka lifted a hand and brushed his fingers over the spot Toph's lips had touched him.


	15. En Route

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER FIFTEEN: En Route**

_**or**_

**Sokka Realizes What He's Been Missing**

* * *

"So," said Katara, leaning in the doorframe of the room she and Toph were set to share for the evening.

Toph combed her fingers through her hair. She pulled free the headband holding it in place—the riotous black mass spilled down the dip of her shoulders. Shaking her head to accustom herself to the rustle and flow of the unpinned mane, she volleyed back, "So." Over the stone floor her bare feet flexed, seeking out Katara's expression.

The Waterbender, whose face would have been unreadable to those with normal sight and was therefore an even blanker slate to Toph, moved into the room and closed the door carefully behind her. She tapped her fingers against its surface, _ratta-tik-tat_. Toph turned on her mattress to point her face in her friend's general direction, and Katara said finally, "So, Miss Bei Fong, it looks like you're getting what you've always wanted." Despite that she tried to sound serious, the corners of her mouth twitched up into the vestiges of a grin.

Toph fanned her fingers over her mouth, feigning surprise. "Why, _Lady Katara_," she gasped, "whatever can you mean?"

With something like a squeal, Katara flung herself onto Toph's small mattress. The springy surface rocked them together—Toph's sturdy shoulder sank unwittingly into Katara's softer side, but the Waterbender ignored it and hissed, clapping her hands over the smaller woman's knees, "I think he's finally started _growing a brain_, Toph! Miracles _do _happen!"

Toph's hands hovered midair a moment, startled, reluctant. Seconds later, though, she lowered them and curved her rough palms against the Waterbender's smooth knuckles. She chewed her lip—she swallowed. "You think?" she ventured cautiously at last. As Katara drew a breath to respond, Toph went on hurriedly, "I mean, the whole thing in Gaoling—I didn't _plan _that, Katara; I didn't mean for him to—"

"I know, I know," Katara interrupted. She gave the knees in her possession a squeeze. "Believe me, I do. Only Sokka could think up something that crazy, Toph. The point is, he didn't have to do what he did and—and he did it anyway! And tonight, the way he _looked_ at you—I mean, wow…"

"Princess," deadpanned Toph, "mind clarifying that a bit for me?"

"_Realization_," crowed Katara. Jostling the Earthbender's knobby kneecaps in a relentless rattle, she said again, "Realization, Toph. It was like he suddenly had this huge magical epiphany about you, and he couldn't take his eyes off you the _whole night_." Smug, Katara finished, "He's only looked that dazed once, and it was the first time he threw his boomerang. It hit his temple broadside. He's still got a dent there. He was cross-eyed for _days_—"

Toph only partway listened as Katara bubbled on about Sokka's wayward youth. Behind her ribs her heart thudded mercilessly, and at last she lowered her head and whispered, her granite voice softened now to a limestone husk, "Katara?"

Instantly Katara fell quiet. She studied the Earthbender curiously—there was really too much hair in Toph's face for her to be sure, but she thought the other girl was blushing. "Yes?" she nudged.

"He—" Toph faltered. She licked her lips, drawing them back in a grimace. Spirits, the world's greatest Earthbender was going mushminded over a boy! The mixed euphoria and humiliation of that notion colored scarlet trellises over her pale cheeks. "He tried to kiss me, I think," she forced out. In defiance and pride both, she lifted her chin and smiled: an uncertain and nevertheless fierce blaze of teeth. "Me," she revisited. And then, a third time, so quiet Katara had to strain her ears to hear it, "…me."

Katara mentally gave her brother a round of resounding applause and replied aloud, fervent, "About time." She paused, considering. "So," she hedged after a moment, her tone sly, "you've got to tell me something, Toph."

"Mm?"

"…when's the wedding?"

Toph pushed Katara off the bed.

* * *

"So," said Sokka, leaning in the doorframe of the room he and Aang were set to share for the evening.

The other boy made no reply, sitting crosslegged in the middle of the room's hewn floor. His wrists rested on his knees—his palms faced heavenward, the tips of his index fingers touched to his thumbs. Every few seconds or so his thin chest rose and fell again, like the swell of a wave, and the smoky light from the oil lamp in the corner of the room sent soft shadows scurrying across his head and its bold blue arrow. "Mm," he grunted finally. "So?" came the rejoinder, and his voice rippled from far, far away, distant and muted and mystical.

Sokka was in no mood for it.

"So," he began conversationally, studying his nails (rugged and manly, they were), "you knew, huh? About Toph? How she felt?"

Aang shifted a little. "Yes."

"How long?" demanded the tribesman. He clenched his hand into a fist—his rugged, manly nails bit into his lifeline, and he scowled in satisfaction at the sting.

Aang shifted again, his smooth brow creased now by a line that wrinkled the very tip of the arrow there. He inhaled: _haaaah_, the lamplight playing over the faint valleys between his ribs. "Long time," he sighed.

"And Katara? She knew too, huh?"

Another sigh, this one accompanied by a small smile. "Yes."

"Dude!" Sokka exploded. He stomped into the room—he slammed the door, shaking stern knuckles inches from Aang's small snubbed nose. "You both _suck_! Why didn't anyone _say _anything? Why, huh? _Why_?"

Aang opened his eyes and looked at Sokka. There was something eerie and ethereal about his gaze, so grey and soft and certain; Sokka flinched backward and the Avatar followed him, rocking onto his knees. His voice was normal again when he spoke.

"Only the blind," he said cheerfully, tapping a finger against Sokka's forehead, "may lead the blind."

For a moment, silence persisted.

But then, "You still _suck_," Sokka groused, and leaned over to blow out the lamp.


	16. Check Yes Or No

**Commentary: **=) Nearing the end here…

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Check Yes or No**

_**or**_

**Toph Takes a Step**

* * *

A week passed.

It was, Sokka reflected years later, a pretty epic week.

In the mornings he rose and there, _there _was Toph and his sister and Aang too, and they had breakfast together in their shared quarters. The first two days Toph fought the group's vegetarian like a demon for the basket of sweetrolls. On the third Sokka simply plucked them up and handed them to her—"Eat something else; they're her favorite," he scolded the despairing Avatar. Settling back into his porridge, he looked sidelong and found himself rewarded by the sight of Toph beaming at him around twin cheekfuls of bread.

"Fankth, 'Oozleth," she said. Rather than punching him in the arm, she leaned in to make smacking noises nearby his ear. It was gross—Katara gagged—but it was also Toph's quintessence, and that made it okay.

"You have crumbs in your hair, sir," Sokka's receptionist told him a few hours later. That was less okay.

At first Sokka had no real conception of what exactly Toph _did _during the workday, much the same as he didn't know the specifics of what Aang and Katara were up to in their meetings with the Earth King and his cabinet. He got the idea her doings were pretty hands-on, though, when the same receptionist who had noticed the breakfast bits in his hair leaned hesitantly into his office on the fourth day after Toph's arrival and hedged, "Sir? There's a young Earthbender here to see you. She says she's your fiancée, and she's—"

"Starving," Toph cut in. Ducking under the receptionist's arm, she paraded into Sokka's office, wearing an Earth Kingdom soldier's uniform and what appeared to be an entire practice field's worth of mud. Dark footprints marked her passage—globs of the stuff fell off the uniform and spattered across Sokka's mostly clean floor. The receptionist wrinkled her nose. "Famished," continued Toph, indifferent to the mess she was making. "Ravenous. _Hungry_."

She skirted the edge of Sokka's desk, tracing her fingers—and leaving thick stains—over the papers on its surface. Dropping herself into his lap with a shameless squelch, Toph threw an arm around his neck, tucked her filthy head under his chin, and announced, "Hey baby. I'm feeling a little peckish. Let's get lunch, huh?"

"Sir," the receptionist attempted frostily, "the southern border treaties…"

"Fresh _caaaaaah_-rispy seafood kebabs," Toph countered, and a dollop of muck rolled down her wrist and onto a cluster of documents, "with spicy chili prawns."

"'Baby?'" wondered Sokka.

"You liked it," Toph said. She fluttered her eyelashes.

"The _treaties_… they're due by three hours past noon, sir…!" That was the receptionist again.

Sokka provided, "It confused multiple parts of my brain."

"That poor little feeble thing," sighed the Earthbender. Kicking her feet up onto the desk, she splattered mud over nearly every available surface—including the treaties in question—and resumed, "Well then, _sweetheart_, let's go eat. I came all the way here and I am not leaving without you"—she gave his bicep a prod—"or those kebabs."

The tribesman considered. "That stall on the corner?" At Toph's nod, he agreed, "Yeah, okay—they're pretty good." He rose. Toph slid from his knees and strode purposefully back around the desk, through the door, and presumably out of the building. Most of the mud in her wake collected itself and, after congealing into the form of a finger-wagging receptionist, proceeded after her.

"Toph Bei Fong," Sokka informed the prank's subject. "My, uh—my fiancée." He had the decency to sound sheepish.

"She's completely charming, sir," said the receptionist drily, eyeing in distaste the few smudgy footprints Toph had left behind. "Congratulations."

The treaties were late. The kebabs were delicious.

In the evenings it was a toss-up as to who would arrive back at the inn first, but whoever did immediately started dinner. Katara made stews. Fish and meats were Sokka's specialty. Aang had a weakness for sweet pasties and casseroles, and Toph often waltzed in with armfuls of fresh fruit from the market. Without the looming threat of war, meals proceeded much more slowly, nigh _leisurely _than they had a few years prior, interspersed with the occasional grapple for the last bites of a dessert. There were jokes. There were fork fights, idle musings—"Has anyone else noticed that the cabbage vendor seems to be afraid of us?" pondered Katara—and conversations that spanned hours, delving deep into the night when even the stars looked sleepy. They were together again and they were happy, and sometimes Sokka almost forgot what exactly had facilitated their reunion. Only days past, the events at the Bei Fong estate in Gaoling seemed distant, dreamlike.

On the seventh day after her arrival in Ba Sing Se, Toph walked quietly from the room she shared with Katara and sat down beside him at the table in their quarters' common area. He was plotting the group's route to Omashu for the coming week, his elbows anchoring a map to the table's surface, a brush clenched in his fingers. The light in the lamp was low now, the room bathed in a pale yellow glow—he grunted a greeting and she volleyed it back, a yawn caught in the cage of her fingers. Propping her chin in her hand, she drowsed, her eyes contented slits that sparked and shaded too as the lamp burned down its wick. Under the table her toes dangled nearby his ankle.

"Did you try to kiss me back in Gaoling?" she asked him suddenly. "Outside the wall?"

Dropping the brush, Sokka looked furtively down at the diminutive Earthbender. She didn't seem angry, confused, pleased, curious—her expression was neutral, lids lowered, mouth crooked at the corner. The fingers at her cheek opened like flower petals, stretched, closed again.

"Yes," Sokka said.

"Why?"

"It—compulsion, uhm," he tried. Toph's brows rose. Reaching instinctively for the brush he'd dropped, Sokka somehow found her other hand instead. He clutched at it. Her thumb was hard, her knuckles harder still. There was a scar between two of those and he rubbed it gingerly, and managed, "I wanted to. But I didn't because—you know," he hazarded, "_things_. Fear. Uh. Bad breath. …insert excuse here?"

"Okay," Toph agreed peaceably. "Do you still want to? Kiss me, I mean?"

Sokka gazed at his friend and thought of the week's passing, kebab lunches and contentment all. He thought of how happy he'd been when she'd appeared unexpectedly at his office, and how much better beer tasted now that she was here to drink it with him. He thought of how _awesome _his life was with the resident blind Bei Fong in it. His stomach lurched and his palms felt sweaty and he opened his mouth, half-panicked, to tell her, _I don't want to screw this up, Toph_, _really I don't and I am terrified of losing this, of losing you,_ but actually he said, "Yeah, that'd be good," and then their faces were inches apart, whoa, just like that. He felt her breath on his cheek, tickling.

"Right," murmured Toph. Her hand flattened over the table as she pushed herself aright. Their mouths met, a little by accident but mostly not and her lips, clumsy, moved against his. "I," she said into his skin, "uh—don't know how—this—"

Her cheeks were small and round and surprisingly soft, thought Sokka as he lifted his hands to cup them. He pressed them, tipping her head back—he caught her lower lip, worried it, grated his teeth delicately over its swell. Her mouth parted, a growl. He muffled it. She let him. Dimly he registered the sensation of her fingers climbing over his. For all she was an Earthbender her kiss was wet, and for all he wasn't a Waterbender Sokka still knew what to do about it.

When it was over, that first embrace, Toph's thumbs lingered in the wells of his wrists, her hands clutched about him; Sokka's chest hitched and jumped as the heart in it turned somersaults. Beneath his palms Toph's cheeks were aflame.

"Uh—well," ventured the tribesman finally. "That was—just." He licked his lips and tasted Toph there, strong tea, faint sugar. "Can we do it again?"

"Seconds," demanded the Earthbender. She yanked him back down.

Sokka encouraged some time later, "Thirds?"

Eventually they lost count.

"Why's the map all smeared, Sokka?" asked Katara the next morning.

"And what's that on your neck?" Aang pursued, squinting in his direction.

"Yeah, Sokka. What _is _that?" Forever and always his best friend, Toph smirked at him fiendishly around a sweetroll. "Looks _huge_."


	17. Return to Sender

**Commentary**: One more chapter after this. I hope you've enjoyed the ride!

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Return to Sender**

_**or**_

**Back Where They Started**

* * *

A week turned into a month, and that month into still more months, and those months into a year. Two years. Three. There were adventures, and alcohol; there were good times, laughter around small flickering fires at night. There were bad times too, feuds and fights and screaming matches that shook mountains. There were apologies of jerky—"You'd better eat it all; that imported shit's expensive," snarled Toph as she shoved the package against his chest—and of silence, hands tracking tears down stubborn cheeks. There were more kisses, some slow, others not. There was hesitation first, certainty next. There were almost always bitemarks on Sokka's neck and an accompanying grin stamped across Toph's smug face.

Time, slippery and swift and roundabout in its special way, swept along.

And finally, there was a letter.

"Toph," said Aang. He ducked into the tavern, too tall now to pass through most doors without bending his knees. Nudging between a few rosy-cheeked patrons, he stopped at the pretzel that constituted two of his best friends and said again, "Toph." In his hands a scroll fluttered, its ends crinkled under his fingers.

"Busy," grunted the Earthbender. She chewed her lip, marbled eyes fixed on a spot somewhere along the tavern's far wall. Sokka's touch slid lower and she huffed out, half-laughing, "What? Having some trouble there, Snoozles? Am I too much for you?"

With a thrust and a gasp, Sokka denied, "Never!" He gave it everything he had.

His arm slammed into the tabletop two seconds later. As he yelped and snatched back the limb to nurse his wounded knuckles, Toph made a _tsk-tsk _noise, blew on the tips of her fingers, and sighed, "I don't know why you keep punishing yourself like this. You're never going to beat me."

"Toph," Aang attempted.

"I will one day!" disputed the tribesman. He punched the table, yelped again, and cradled the abused limb against his chest. He aimed a scowl at his intended. "Just wait and see," he grumbled.

Toph chuckled, groping out for the mug of ale she'd set aside before the impromptu arm-wrestling match. "Oh yeah, sure." She sipped at the beverage, hissing in approval at its burn on her tongue. "I'll get right on tha—"

"Toph," Aang interjected as gently as he could, "your parents are dead."

Time never stops, not really, but for the three friends it slowed to what seemed an imperceptible crawl. Aang swallowed, the sound like cannonfire even in the rowdy tavern. Body nerveless, Sokka dropped his arms and barely registered the resulting throb of his defeated fist. The letter in Aang's hands produced a faint crackling sound as he clutched at it, _k-chhhk_, and both men looked anxiously across the table at the blind Earthbender.

Overflowing her mouth's stunned pucker, ale dribbled down her chin.

Sokka blinked and time jolted mercilessly forward. In a numb blur they collected Katara, packed Appa. On the three-day flight to Gaoling Toph said precious little to anyone, and when they reached the Bei Fong estate she dismounted and made for the mansion's stone wall alone.

"Go after her," Katara whispered to Sokka, but she needn't have bothered—Sokka was already sliding down the bison's flank.

The trees whispered behind him, sighed. Near eventide, the sky was a bowl of deep blue and etched purple edges, and he caught up to Toph at the wall's grandiose—but barred—entry. There she hesitated, one hand fisted nearby her hip, the other extended toward the familiar crest on the gates. Shadows danced along the boar's wings, threw its tusks into sharp relief. Oblivious to them, the Earthbender smeared her palm across the still-warm metal and said, "Well." Her throat worked. "Here I am."

"Here _we _are," Sokka corrected, feeling as though it was necessary for Toph to understand she wasn't alone.

A flicker of something took the Earthbender's features, twisted them. For a moment Sokka thought it was anger, but then she reached for him and her fingers hooked in the fabric of his tunic at his elbow. "Here we are," she repeated, the words hoarse. She flared her other hand and the gates squeaked open seemingly of their own volition.

Together they walked into the estate.

They skirted the mansion proper, instead heading straight for the gardens. The house was dark anyway, its windows shuttered; the grounds themselves had fallen into vague disarray, having gone nearly a month without attention from the family's hired help. Here rested an abandoned trowel, there a pair of shears. Toph kicked the former viciously into the bushes, took three more steps, and stopped.

The settlement's remote location and small population mostly protected Gaoling from the occasional conflicts still known to ignite at the hands of anti-Zuko insurgents. Fortunate geography shielded it too from unseasonably hot or cold weather—it tended toward a temperate climate year round. Reasonable nutrient deposits in the soil kept crops hearty and the people fed; wealthy residents like the Bei Fongs ensured any political problems were quickly addressed by the Kingdom's government.

For all this, though, Gaoling was not immune to disease, and its residents were still reeling from an outbreak of influenza that had claimed over forty lives.

Before Toph rose two identical mounds of earth, sequestered into the same bed as the estate's best roses. Speckles of faint green already marked the graves.

Releasing Sokka's sleeve, Toph barked out mirthless laughter and scrubbed her palms down her face. "I guess that's it," she grated. She grinned but there was no joy in the expression—the corner of her mouth wobbled dangerously. Gesturing toward the roses and the company they now kept, she insisted, "You're free to go now, Snoozles. Yeah?" Her arm waved, frenetic. "I mean, you're off the hook, right? No more contract. No more monthly bride price. You can just—"

Her throat clinked. She retched out a miserable cry next, soft in the twilight, muted. Drawing her hands back to muffle the noise, she pulled at her cheeks with her fingers, smearing dirt and tears there, and Sokka stepped to her and dragged her close. As she raked her nails over his chest and raged into the well of his collar, he touched the nape of her neck and scolded quietly, "Don't be an idiot, Toph."

She paused. In the distance a finch sang, recalling the last time they had stood on this lawn together under scrutiny, streamers, and nevertheless happier circumstances.

Angling her fist sideways, Toph kidney-punched Sokka. Then she clutched at him and cried.


	18. Route Complete

**Commentary: **Here's the last of it! Sorry for the delay—life has been busy. However, I hope you've enjoyed the story. Especially you, Crossy. =)

Thank you all so much for reading!

* * *

_**DELIVERY**_

**CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Route Complete**

_**or**_

**To Hell With Plans**

* * *

It was well and truly dark when Aang and Katara crept through the gate and approached the gardens. In the sky a moon like half a lemon gleamed quietly—the nearby forest's nightsong of crickets rose in rippling concerto. Rubbing his shaven head as he came to them, the Avatar surveyed Toph and Sokka together. The tribesman still held his best friend and they sat slumped before the graves of her parents, dark lumps now in the evening's faint light. The Earthbender's head rested in a crook against Sokka's shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her jaw lax. Smudging streaks and small silt slurries marked where tears had dripped down and dried upon her face.

"Is she okay?" asked Aang.

Toph convulsed in the wan moonlight, throwing out an arm. The earth under Aang's feet lurched and shuddered obediently. "Don't talk about me like I'm not here," she snapped.

"Sorry, sorry!" Aang lifted his hands, the pair of them flared out like fans, and gesticulated anxiously. "I didn't mean—"

"_Are _you okay, Toph?" interrupted Katara. She moved forward and knelt on Toph's spare side, thus encasing the smaller woman in a Water Tribe sandwich. She nudged in close. Toph grunted, not quite protesting, and Katara reached for her hand and worried it between her own brown palms. Giving the tribeswoman what passed for a resigned look, the Earthbender at last laced her fingers in Katara's and gave in to huddling between the siblings. When Aang padded up in his petal-soft manner to rest his fingers in a curl atop her head, she let him.

Peace persisted as long as it needed to, and then Toph answered, "I'm okay." She wasn't, of course, but she smiled anyway and nodded toward the graves. "It's nice. Thin soil, loose on top, packed down at the bottom. Good earth." Her breath stuttered out. "It likes them." She stopped, considering. Sokka tightened his hold on her; Katara scooted closer, and Aang's fingertips, not unlike a chance breeze, made a daring caress through her hair. "It does like them," she reinforced. "_They _wouldn't like it—they'd probably think it was dirty, but it isn't, not really. It sustained them for years, growing things here in their garden, and now they're sustaining it and it's fitting, I guess , I mean…"

She trailed off. She was in the damnable limbo between crying and introspection, and frankly she was suited to neither. Sensing her misery, Sokka tightened his arm still more. His grip was uncomfortable but welcome all the same, and the Earthbender muttered, lifting a hand to grind its heel into her cheek, "I just wish I could see them one more time."

"Well, that would take a miracle," blurted Sokka immediately.

Katara jerked and stared at her brother, aghast. Aang made a noise like a squished badgerfrog. Even the twittery finch in the tree nearest the wall was too horrified to sing.

But Toph wrenched out a strangled, startled cackle that swelled to fill the night. Clinging fast to Sokka, she laughed in the same way a wound bleeds away infection, the sound cracked and crumbling and sincere most of all. When her throat was dry and her cheeks nevertheless wet again, she thrust her face into the tribesman's shoulder and admitted, "You're okay sometimes, Snoozles."

Sokka shrugged and smiled, bobbling the Earthbender's head. "I do what I can." With an absent thumb he smoothed moisture from her jaw. She exhaled noisily but permitted the attention, and after a moment he ventured, "What do you want to do now, Toph? If—if you want to do anything at all. You know. About, uhm." His mouth twitched. "This." And finally, "Us."

"Sokka!" Katara hissed, revolted. "You have the _worst _timing in the _world_."

"Hey, _hey_," protested her brother. "I'm just trying to be one half of a healthy couple here, Katara. I'm putting things out in the open. _Discussing issues as they arise_."

"Oh wow, is that what being an insensitive jerk is called nowadays?" seethed the younger sibling. "I'm sorry. I must have missed the _memo_—"

"Children," Toph suggested, "shut up."

Katara and Sokka shut up.

Tapping the latter's arm with her fingers, the Earthbender was silent a moment. Her features pinched as she grimaced, struggling with some inner conflict—watching her, Katara only just resisted the urge to slap her brother senseless. Toph looked utterly miserable. As far as the Waterbender was concerned, said misery was mostly Sokka's fault.

Before Katara could give in to the temptation of inflicting bodily harm upon the tribesman, Toph agreed bitterly, "You're right, Sokka."

Such words from his intended were so rare that Sokka jerked warily back a bit. Against his elbow the fabric of Toph's sleeve rasped. "I am," he voiced, and ventured next, stupefied, "…I am?"

"Sure," acknowledged Toph. She bared her teeth at him in a too-wide smile, the flash of her incisors cool in the yellow moonlight's faint fall. "Best to put things out in the open, right? Get it all out there. Isn't that what you just said?"

The sensation of sticking both feet in his mouth up to the ankles washed over Sokka as he hedged, "Yeah—"

"_Yeah_." Toph cocked her head toward him. Her lips pressed over her teeth, hiding their shine in a wobbling frown. Her eyes widened, slanted again, slid closed. Sucking in a sharp breath, she insisted, "Let's be honest, then. Do you want out of this or not?" She jerked a thumb toward the wall and presumably the forest beyond. "Just say the word. I'll leave."

"It's _your _house!"

"Well"—Toph waved a dismissive hand—"you've given my parents a lot of money over the past couple of years, so I guess I owe you. Maybe it _isn't _my house anymore. Maybe it's yours."

"I don't want it." Scowling now, Sokka eyed his best friend. "What the hell, Toph? Why are you talking like this? It's like you've transformed into an insecure princess or somethi—"

"Don't," snarled the Earthbender, "act like _you _didn't bring this up, you asshole."

"I didn't!"

"You did so! You wanted to talk about _us_," Toph reminded him hotly.

"Uh-huh," Sokka supplied, "right. What to _do _about us. I wanted—no. I _still _want to talk about that. Because your parents, I mean, they're dead, and—"

"And that technically means you're done here," said Toph. "With me."

Running his hand down his face with a groan, Sokka peeped through his fingers at the sullen Earthbender. "Toph," he reasoned, "answer me this, all right? Do you _want _to end our rela… our re-lay-shun… uhm. Our _thing_?"

The ensuing silence was stifling. Katara held her breath. Aang seemed to have slipped into a meditative coma, and Sokka—because he did possess one shred of tact—refrained from goading or prodding the shortest of their company for her answer. Dredging the fathomless mine that made up her soul, Toph grudgingly provided after some indeterminate stretch of time, "…no."

Katara exhaled and Sokka went on, "Good. Me neither. I love you, you know"—some distance away, a small mountain exploded—"and I'm pretty sure you feel the same, so just—just _get _the idea that I want to run away from you out of your head, okay?"

Immobile in the darkness, Toph said nothing at first. Ultimately, though, she acknowledged, "Fine." Her mouth worked and Sokka thought maybe she wanted to say something else, wanted to tack on another thought, but instead she pursued, "What exactly did you want to talk about, then, if you're not wanting to get rid of me?"

"Uh," and Sokka's voice slipped low, "kind of the exact opposite, actually." At the rise of Toph's eyebrow he clarified, "You told me a long time ago that you… you didn't want to marry me. And now you don't have to, since your parents… uh, can't… _reinforce _the idea that you should marry anyone, let alone me, so. _That's _off the agenda."

He paused, groping for words. Toph waited. A hopeful cricket chirped, the shadows on the unkempt lawn flickered, and Sokka resumed, "Call it selfish, but I was counting on them to keep—keep you _with _me for a while. One day they were going to get tired of Aang's letters and insist on us finally, you know, going through with stuff, sure, and if you still weren't ready then, no problem. I'm the plan guy." He said this mostly to himself and, with his head down, missed Toph's smirk. "I could've thought of something else at that point, I guess, to stall for more time, or maybe I could've acknowledged that it was necessary to let you…"

He trailed off. Toph's eyes met his by chance, held them an instant, shifted away again. "…let you go, if that's what you wanted," Sokka forced out. "But now"—he gestured to the graves, heedless of the fact that Toph couldn't see this—"they're gone and I thought I'd have more _time_, Toph, to convince you, but since I don't I was hoping we could tal—"

"Wait, wait, whoa." Frowning, the young woman smacked at Sokka's knee. Her open palm hit the joint and made a dull _whut _there. "Hold on. You thought you'd have more time to convince me to what?"

"To marry me," Sokka answered easily, and emphasized, "for real. No contract. No meddling. No weird bald go-betweens." Aang fidgeted and the tribesman finished, "Just me asking you and you saying… whatever you wanted to say."

"Oh." The Earthbender blinked.

"…yeah."

"Huh." She delicately plumbed a nostril. Removed an obstruction. Flicked it off into the night (Katara was forced to duck).

"Mm-hmm," Sokka intoned.

"Okay then!" Slapping her hands down on the cool lawn, Toph smiled and shrugged. "I'm convinced. Is that it? Great! Let's go."

She stood. Her elbow caught Katara in the face—"My eye!" yelped the Waterbender—and her skull rocketed into Aang's chin. This caused him to bite his tongue and provoked from the Avatar a wounded keen. Heedless of the turmoil, however, Toph spun on a heel to storm off toward the estate's gate.

But, "Hey!" Sokka called. He staggered to his feet and stumbled after his best friend. "Hey, wait a sec! Did you just—"

He tripped. The lawn undulated immediately up to cushion his fall and he grasped at Toph's ankles, desperate, writhing first through a cluster of prickleweeds and next over an anthill. "Did you just agree to marry me?" he demanded.

She stopped. Sokka stared up at her, his hands affixed still about one of her calves. The muscles in it flexed, rippled, and then she turned and hunkered down in front of him. Her elbows fell atop her thighs and her fingers dangled between them, the tips mere inches from Sokka's brow. Even in the thin moonlight he could tell her cuticles were filthy.

"What?" she asked. "Having second thoughts already?"

"No." Sokka rocked onto his knees and rejoined, sullen, "But you know, a few ants just bit me on the ass. Left cheek, Toph."

"Sounds like a personal problem." Her face was suddenly very close to his. "Back there," she began brusquely, "you said." Her gumption faltered. "You said," she attempted again, and then looked at him helplessly, or what passed for looking.

"I said," he started, and whatever else he intended to add was lost in the crush of Toph's mouth against his own. He lifted his hands, startled, and she clutched at them as she lunged against him. She was heavy and weirdly muscled and her knee sank into his vulnerable bits, but years of sorta-dating Toph had conditioned him toward durability. With only the smallest wince he returned her embrace. He managed to snake an arm around her eventually too.

"Get a room," groaned Katara, stomping past them and nursing with the contents of her waterskin the beginnings of a beautiful black eye. "C'mon, Aang. We'll go wait somewhere else while they"—her tone was two parts disgusted and one part indulgent—"_frisk_."

The Waterbender's companion nodded. He paused after a few steps, though, to survey his other two friends. Noting in silent satisfaction the single coil their shadows made across the lawn, Aang allowed himself a grin before he scurried off after Katara and left the gardens altogether.

Meanwhile, Toph pulled reluctantly back for air and set her hands to work on Sokka's wardrobe—or rather, relieving him of it. She staggered upright too and yanked him with her, and with her fingers fumbling over his sleeve she insisted, "Take me somewhere. Somewhere else. And show me you meant what you said." Ducking her head, she hid her flushed face from him and finished, "Damn it, Sokka, why does your shirt have so many buttons?"

Sokka considered. He looked at the empty house and thought, _No, not there, _and then at the front gate. _No, too sister-y_. His heart thumped. Toph's nails discovered the seam in his collar and, with a sound of relish, she ripped the garment free. Buttons flew everywhere. The shirt fell to the lawn in a blue puddle and Sokka found abruptly that hey, look at that, his own hands had somehow managed to strip away Toph's vest. _Awesome_.

"C'mon, Plan Guy," Toph persisted into the skin of his neck, and bit it for good measure. "Make with the magic and _move_."

Sokka smiled. He had no real idea of what to do, no flash of inspiration but for one. Struck by a memory and its advice colored in candleflame, he said cheerily, "Only the blind may lead the blind," and took Toph's hand. By way of the back gate, he led her out into the night.


End file.
